Sample Solution

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 biggest potential disruptors in the near future. They are closely linked, as brain research indicates that the mechanisms of games are more in tune with the way we learn than current classroom practice. Introducing a wide range of game scenarios into the learning process will have a significant impact. This should no