As pointed out in the section on Neuroscience above, gaming and game-based learning appears to be the optimal way to learn. Over the next few years games and gaming will increasingly take a significant role in learning.
It is important to separate out Gaming from Gamification. Gamification is basically gaming-lite, whereby students get points, rewards, badges and reach levels as they learn. This is no different from the motivational gold stars or scouting badges used over the last hundred years or so and while it has some positive effects, does not have the significant impact on, or potential for, education that actual games have. The key points about gaming for education are as follows:
1. The increase in Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing games has a huge potential for teaching and learning as this allows groups of students to interact. More sophisticated simulation-based games focussing on co-operative and project-based tasks (as opposed to fighting and levelling-up) will become increasingly important. Open-world sandbox games where the players create their own scenarios and goals are particularly rich.
2. Education games will need to have the same production values as commercial games. The impact of one-task one-game educational games (e.g. ‘pop all the balloons with prime numbers’) is fast diminishing outside early years education.
3. As Blended Learning becomes more important in the classroom, collateral resources for games will be needed. For example, in the case of How to Train Your Dragon, worksheets, literacy activities, physical experiments etc combined with the online game will have a significant impact.
4. Physical games and paper and pen games (such as the original Dungeons and Dragons) will have as much of a role to play as computer games.
5. Learning game design will become as important for education as playing games. There is a potential opportunity here for game building kits that allow students to create both electronic and physical games.
6. The take up of Virtual Reality in the classroom is likely to be slow due to practical and financial considerations. This may change as the headsets become cheaper, though classroom management issues will mean that teachers will probably prefer to have the students engaging with VR via screens in the short term.
7. VR builders will be as important, if not more important, than VR experiences. The ability of students to create VR worlds and games will open up the opportunity to teach a huge range of skills. Students should not only have the ability to drag and drop assets and create paths and triggered events in VR worlds but should also have the ability to create and skin assets themselves with simple 3D tools.
In conclusion – Neuroscience and Gaming are probably the two big