Thunder

Yesterday I attended Becta’s ‘Enhancing learning; virtual worlds, simulations and game based learning’ seminar. It was an excellent even, a shame only 3 Local Authorities sent representation, the majority of the audience were game/e-learning companies and university representatives.

Dave Hassell kick started the day, setting the scene etc. The first question posed was ‘what is a game?’, there are a variety of answers for that and examples are given in his presentation. What I think was important is that it doesn’t really matter what your answer is, ie what the product is, what is important is the outcome achieved by the ‘game’. He stated that over £1 billion has been spent in the education sector over that last 5 years on content, how much value for money have we had from this investment? We need a strategic approach to this spend and the sector should investigate what it wants the content to achieve first.

When students are playing games we should think about the following:

If ‘games’ are beneficial then how do we get the workforce to adopt them? What interventions are needed to achieve this? Should we do this or should we leave computer games for students use at home?

Presentations can be downloaded from the Becta website.