How does assessment and games work?

How can schools thoughtfully and effectively integrate games into meaningful learning?
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Bill MacKenty
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Posts: 23
Joined: Sun Mar 03, 2019 9:06 pm
Location: Warsaw, Poland

Using games in education requires a higher standard of educational efficacy than other, more traditional forms of instruction.


Because it’s a game.
Because games are thought of as strictly recreational tools.
Because many people think “students spend to much time in front of games”. Because we can’t stick a student in front of a game and expect miracles.
Because games are not thought of as educational.
Because public education is the last industry in the United States to still be debating the efficacy of technology as a whole.
Are we using Civilization 3 to teach the relationship between science and civilization prosperity? Prove the understanding with authentic, accessible, assessment. Demonstrate the learning. We are teaching students to think about the game and to develop those higher order thinking skills. To evaluate and analyze subtle and complex interrelationships. We need to be able to point at the game and say “See? It’s working!”

How do we know a student knows? Are there different levels of knowing something? Surely simple memorization is different than analyzing, evaluating and synthesizing. Computer games (and technology in general) confers a deeper lever of knowledge than simple drill and recall learning activities. Therefore, we must use correct assessment tools.
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