With the development of the gaming industry, it has become popular to use gaming in educational environments. While educators and researchers have a deeper insight into the educational value of gaming, it seems that there is a consensus that some video games can indeed improve students’ learning. This article has been written by StateOfWriting.org experts to help you learn how to use gaming to streamline your studies. Now, let’s review eight reasons why playing games can be beneficial for students.
1. Enhances Engagement and Motivation
Perhaps the most important benefit of gamification is that it will likely increase students’ engagement and motivate them to participate in learning activities. Games have an inherent ability to capture attention and can, therefore, make learning more rewarding. The fact that a complex subject is transformed into an interactive challenge makes it more likely that students will engage with it on a deeper level and for longer periods of time.
2. Develops Problem-Solving Skills
The nature of many games is to present you with a puzzle or a scenario in which you must work out the next step towards your goal. In a game, your progress is measured against how effectively you apply logic and creativity to solve problems. This aspect of gaming offers huge opportunities for applying analytical and problem-solving skills that are directly transferable to academic and real-world contexts. Modern students learn to think outside the box and seek tools and lifehacks to make various processes easier and speedier. For example, they may think of hiring academic writers instead of labouring over a boring or tedious assignment, choosing to focus on a more rewarding project instead. This ability to consider pros and cons and actively choose to follow a more streamlined path is a skill that is highly transferable into various everyday situations.
3. Promotes Cognitive Flexibility
The nature of gaming, with its rapidly changing environments and rules, can help students learn to effectively switch between tasks, a skill that psychologists refer to as cognitive flexibility. Improved cognitive flexibility can enhance academic performance because students are better able to understand and process information from multiple perspectives.
4. Improves Memory and Attention to Detail
When playing video games, students need to retain a large amount of information in their memory, and process it in a short period of time. Students who frequently play numerous video games will definitely have the ability to improve their memory capacity, in addition to their attention to detail.
5. Facilitates Immediate Feedback and Adaptation
Since feedback in educational gaming is often immediate and direct, signalling what just happened and what the student needs to do differently, it creates a rapid feedback loop, accelerating learning. Students can trial and error their way to quick, perceptual understandings of complex concepts and rapidly extinguish misconceptions.
6. Encourages Teamwork and Collaboration
Multiplayer games enable players to collaborate and share a common goal with one another and offer chances for social interactions that may help develop communication skills and the ability to work cooperatively, all of which are important in education and the workforce.
7. Offers Customizable Learning Experiences
It is often possible to play a game at different levels of difficulty. When playing an educational game, you can also manage and alter the level of difficulty to fit the learning pace of the student so that all students – including those with diverse learning profiles and abilities – can achieve mastery. This ensures that there are fewer students who are failing.
8. Broadens Cultural Awareness
Many video games allow players to ‘travel’ to diverse cultural, historical and philosophical locations, thus increasing a student’s cultural awareness and understanding, ultimately providing a fun means of learning about the world beyond a student’s immediate experience. Games such as the long-running Civilisation series, which involves building an empire from historical and cultural foundations, or the popular Assassin’s Creed series, which integrates rich historical contexts into the game’s core ‘world-building’, allow a player to experience more than just a traditional game. The ultimate goal of many such games is to educate the player about complex cultural and historical landscapes, encouraging them to explore and appreciate the variety of human experiences.
Levelling Up Education
Regardless of who ‘wins’ the debate over gaming in education, it seems certain that these insights highlight that there is a place for gaming in education, provided the right balance is found between traditional educational methods and the dynamic, engaging potential that games offer. It’s about making the educational power of gaming work for you – and, in so doing, help to equip the students of today and tomorrow with the sorts of minds and skills they will need for an increasingly digital future. As with every educational tool, it depends on what and how educators choose to use it. So, perhaps it’s time to start thinking about gaming as a new frontier for education.
