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Educational game
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Educational games are games; board and card games, including video games that have been specifically designed to teach people about a certain subject, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand an historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play.
Board games
A board game is a game played with counters or pieces that are placed on, removed from, or moved across a "board" (a premarked surface, usually specific to that game). Examples of educationally-designed board games include BEDMAS and Brain Chain.
Card games
An educational card game is any game using playing cards, either traditional or game-specific. Generally these games expand concepts, such as the food chain, set matching, etc. Flash card games are used to teach math, animal, and dinosaur species. Some card games improve memory.
Video and PC games
Some people call these types of games edutainment because they combine education and entertainment. Closely related to the use of educational games is the use of what is known as Serious games. An educational computer game can be defined as an electronic medium with all the characteristics of a gaming environment that have intended educational outcomes targeted at specific groups of learners. A closely related concept is Digital Game-Based Learning, which combines serious learning and interactive entertainment in a fun, engaging and highly exciting medium.
Computer games can aid the development of proficiency by allowing users to interact with objects and manipulate variables. They are said to be particularly effective when designed to address a specific problem or teach a certain skill in curriculum subjects, where specific objectives can be stated and when deployed selectively within a context relevant to the learning activity and goal.
Simple types of games can be designed to address specific learning outcomes such as recall of factual content. For instance, the Nobel Prize Foundation website uses on-line games to aid children in understanding the discoveries made by its laureates by cleverly embedding the scientific knowledge as part of the game environment.
Other genres of games can enhance the teaching of life skills in students such as financial planning or political knowledge. In the online youth platform TakingITGlobal, a game called "Aiyiti - The Cost of Life" enables the player to assume the roles of family members living in rural Haiti. During the course of the game, the player has to choose life's choices such as whether to send the children to school, which job to work, the level of medical care and quality of life. The aim is to prosper, be educated and boost the household income over a period of time.
To aid in educating students and adults about the finer details of the different political systems, numerous companies have developed simulations that immerse the player into different political systems by forcing them to make realistic political decisions. These games vary from running an actual election campaign, like the games from TheorySpark, to games that allow the player to make the day-to-day decisions of running a country, as seen in Democracy. These types of games appeal to students, educators and adults alike.
Some of the best educational computer games are entertainment games. Examples are: Age of Empires (which teaches history and culture), the Sims (teaches home economics/personal budgeting), SimCity (teaches city planning), science fiction games (inspire people to enter the fields of astronomy, invention, physics, and new engineering), god games (Zoo Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc.)(teach management). These games are more popular than educational computer games, because customers are often uninterested in the preachiness and lack of action in educational games. Oddly, these entertainment computer games can teach just as much as educational computer games. By removing the 'Educational Game' title, game makers are finding that they can sell more copies, and therefore teach more people.
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