29.10.2010

Today, Dr Ashley summed up the essence and wrapped up games based learning after the past few weeks of games playing. I feel that it is very important to have a closure after this activity so that it will not seem as if we are playing just to have fun but to also learn from the games and to understand how we can tap on lessons learnt and adopt them to traditional classroom teaching.

Basically, Dr Ashley touched on the learning outcomes gathered from games based learning. They are mainly:

1.-Games provide concrete experience like the Darfu game which we played several weeks back, it made use of real world context and scenarios. We had to think on our feet for solutions. There was a sense of being there in the camp but not being there physically.

2.-Promote complex and systematic thinking

eg:allowsus to stop and reflect theories/ lesssons which can be applied in real life

3.-Its okay to try to fail, as long as you learn from mistakes.

4.--Promoting informal learning accidental learning,(instructions)

meaningful learning (smoking experience which Dr Ashley shared when a group of boys desperately want to smoke but they are afraid of being caught and thus devising plans to get away with it. In this case, it supports informal learning as the other boys who are clueless will want to learn a trick or two from the experienced boys. I believe that there is an element of collaborative learning in this.

5.-Having fun does not mean

a) not learning or

b) not putting in effort

I was quite puzzled with this learning outcome because I was not able to reconcile fun and putting in effort together. These two terms do not go inline to some extent.However, Dr Ashely proved me wrong and said that playing games do require lots of effort especially when many spend hours after hours on the computer, the psp, the wii and so on. How true is that!

I was impacted with a statement which was said by Dr Ashley which triggered my thinking...

"We must be able to reach them to teach them"