Litabi
Children are exposed to video games from a very early age. They grow up watching their older siblings and sometimes even parents playing video games.
Observation and their tendency to imitate the behaviors of the people around them make children skilled videogame players from very early years of their life.
That is a time when they are developing their cognitive and psychosocial skills. Video games have a massive effect on children’s learning and development. So keeping video games separate from education is becoming an obsolete idea with time.
Having spent so much time in their initial years playing video games, children develop a pattern of learning that is inspired by video games. This imparts a need for educators to integrate video games into education.
Schools need to make radical changes into their existing style of instruction and lesson plans to optimize children’s tendency to learn. Including video games in the instructional methodology and format is hence an advisable strategy.
Why Video Games Are Essential For Education?
People typically think of video games as an activity that takes children away from education.
While that is true to an extent, the use of the right kind of video games at the right time and platform can have a beneficial impact on children’s readiness for education. School management needs awareness of the kinds of video games that can be integrated into educational programs.
A student needs a set of skills to get an education. They include a child’s attentiveness, ability to process the information in mind, understand the targets and goals, contemplate the strategies to achieve them, awareness of the stimuli, and the right responses to them to achieve the desired results.
Video games instill and nurture all these skills in children. So, rather than discouraging children from playing video games, schools should adopt a strategy that helps them utilize the positive effects achieved through children’s exposure to video games.
Educators should integrate games into education from a very early age. Infants and toddlers are typically exposed to Youtube poems and nursery rhymes.
Moreover, they are used to learning alphabets, names of things, and counting on digital technology. Likewise, many such games have been introduced that combine the elements of fun and learning for the children.
Examples Of Educational Video Games For Young Learners
Wordscapes is a very good video game for kids that have spent a lot of time learning words through nursery rhymes on social media websites like Youtube.
Wordscapes is a game that teaches children new words so that they build their vocabulary. The concept of the game is that a child gets countless attempts to solve a puzzle with a crossword-style. The player gets a few hints to solve the puzzle.
Players are challenged as the game prohibits words with three letters and gives more points if the child finds the right order for the words.
At times, the most challenging aspect of the game is to guess the words that are typically easy. The built-in dictionary, like any essay writing service, has, of Wordscapes enables a player to add a new word to his/her vocabulary.
Quizzes are an effective form of knowledge assessment of students. One game built on this concept is The National Geographic Challenge. The game contains a vast range of questions related to different regions and continents.
A game can be started with four players who select an avatar. The questions in the game are timed, and players can try answering tens of them.
The game has very good photographs as well as videos from the archive of National Geographic. Plus, this game is very good for developing general knowledge of students. They learn about various aspects of geography, history and natural sciences.
Here’s Why Children Learn This Instructional Methodology
Children find this method of knowledge building interesting because it follows their interests and routine. They are used to playing video games on mobiles, laptops, and PlayStations.
Integrating video games into education is a way of incorporating fun elements into an otherwise traditional and boring instructional format.
When they are encouraged to play educational video games at school, students’ concept of going to school as a non-leisure activity is radically changed for the better.
It can be concluded that video games carry the immense potential for fostering learning in students of all ages and grades.
Educators should make a concerted effort to use video games for academic purposes. It may take the schools some time and funds to make these changes, but the results make an effort worth it.
