When it comes to teaching young people and children, educational games are absolutely critical.
They allow you to grab the attention of your students and give you a much better chance of them listening and learning than if you were to just read words off of a screen to them.
A lot of the time, games are used for independent learning, during indoor recess and to review the information that has been taught during the day.
Alone, educational games wouldn’t be enough to teach children.
However, when accompanied by other teaching methods, they can be incredibly effective. More effective, in fact, than traditional teaching methods alone.
In this guide, we’re taking a look at why educational games are so important and how to use educational games in the classroom.
Keep on reading to find out more!
What Are Educational Games?
Let’s kick this off by taking a look at what educational games are.
As the name suggests, educational games are essentially just games that have been designed to educate students.
They can be tailored for students of any age, and most of the time they will be used as a type of secondary learning.
This essentially means that they are used to reinforce new information that has already been taught to the students.
Educational games have been used for a very long time, but in the modern day, they are becoming more and more technologically advanced.
The technological advancement of these games is something that has been happening for many years, with 8D World’s joint venture with Spark Capital and Gobi Ventures in 2009 being one of the first.
8D World’s educational game aimed to create an online virtual world where students could go to learn.
The game allowed real students to join, while the teachers in the game were made up entirely of bots.
The idea behind this was that a virtual world would be more interesting and engaging than the real world, so students would be more likely to learn.
Once the game passed the Beta stages, the bot teachers were replaced with a VOIP model that allowed real teachers to teach their students, live in real-time.
8D World was ground-breaking with this virtual educational game. But why are educational games so important when it comes to learning? Let’s take a look.
Why Are Educational Games Important?
Simply put, educational games are incredibly important because research has proven that they are.
Educational games have been used in learning for many years, and through these years plenty of studies have been done into the effectiveness of games in learning.
Almost all these studies have reinforced the idea that educational games are incredibly important.
Just some of the vast array of benefits of educational games include increasing motivation in students, encouraging them to take risks, helping them develop their social and emotional skills and increasing student participation.
In short, there are lots of benefits of educational games, which is why they are included in the teaching plan of most teachers.
In particular, educational games become important when you are teaching boring or complicated topics.
On topics where normal teaching techniques might not be effective, it may be worth implementing educational games to ensure that students are learning the information that is being taught to them.
They are also great for helping students develop skills that traditional learning wouldn’t teach them.
There are lots of different educational games out there, but if you are new to them, you may not know how to use educational games in the classroom. So let’s take a look at how to do this.
How To Use Educational Games In The Classroom
Implementing educational games in the classroom is actually very easy.
After a day of learning, most students will be eager to jump onto a fun game and this re-engagement with the material that has been learned throughout the day can really help them learn the topic.
The best way to use educational games in the classroom is to deploy them when it is clear that attention levels and focus are waning.
Educational games will re-engage learners with the topics taught while also allowing them to learn new skills.
When used correctly, educational games can be not only fun but also really effective when it comes to learning.
To use educational games in the classroom, you should decide whether you want to use them for independent or social learning.
There are benefits to both, and both styles allow learners to develop different skills. Working solo can help learners develop their problem-solving and independence skills.
Often, educational games will allow students to implement the knowledge they have learned in more real-world scenarios than the traditional way that they are taught.
This implementation reinforces the knowledge and engages the learners with it.
So, to use educational games in the classroom, you need to ensure that you time the games correctly and engage the learners with the materials.
In addition to using educational games in the classroom, to use them effectively, you need to engage all learning experiences in the classroom.
The key to successful learning is engagement.
When students are engaged with the materials, they will become more interested in what they are learning, and this will lead to better experiences of learning.
The experience that a student has in learning materials plays a huge role in how much information learners retain.
So creating a good learning experience is essential.
Through fun and engaging educational games that reinforce information learned throughout the day, students are much more likely to learn and retain new information.
That is how to use educational games in the classroom.
Summary
In short, educational games can be very beneficial when used to help students retain new information that they have learned throughout the day.
The games re-engage the students with the information and reinforce what they have learned, increasing the chance of them retaining the information.
It also helps them develop other skills that traditional learning wouldn’t allow them to develop.
Thanks for reading!
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