“A spoon full of sugary games makes the bitter pill of education go down” (Zahir, 2011).  That quote really stuck with me as I read about educational gaming this week.  Out of the four main resources I used to learn about the topic of educational gaming I found many different game learning principles that I plan to incorporate into my science classroom.  As a content area science teacher I believe that the major problem with education as pointed out in Gee’s article is  that “students taught under a regime cannot actually apply their knowledge to solve problems or understand the conceptual lay of the land in the area they are learning” (Gee, p.3).  Application is the highest level of learning and

From all of the articles and videos I viewed overall I would define educational gaming as “aiming to develop students’ abilities to find creative solutions to problems, fostering critical and independent thinking while working in a team setting and taking full advantage of technology“ (Best Colleges Online, 2012).  This isn’t an exact definition, but with all of the different learning principles that compose educational gaming it is a great start! 

There are many learning principles and characteristics in educational gaming, but I’m only going to point out the ones I find to be the most important and interesting: 

Jane McGonigal, 2010- Gaming Can Make a Better World:

• Motivated to do something that matters to collaborate and cooperate

• Deep concentration & focus

• Urgent optimism- desire to act immediately to attack an obstacle, extreme self motivation

• Tight social fabric- like people better, trust them, build bonds

• Blissful productivity- happier working hard

• Epic meaning- awe inspiring missions

• Super empowered hopeful individuals

James Paul Gee- Good Video Games and Good Learning

• Players are producers, not just consumers (p.5)

• Take risks, explore, get up and try again when you fail  (p.6)

• Pleasantly frustrating- doable but challenging (p.9)

This week in one of my other courses we focused on vocabulary instruction.  Well James Paul Gee also talked about learning new vocabulary in his paper.  He says that “situated meanings are when people only know what words mean and learn new ones when they can hook them to the sorts of experiences they refer to such as actions, images, and dialogues” (Gee, p.8).  This is so relevant to teaching students new words in the classroom.  Teaching vocabulary out of context with just the definitions doesn’t help them remember or understand the new word.  Through the situated meanings they can remember the words through the hands on experiences in the classroom where they will increase their likelihood of remembering it.

I loved the idea that the Best Colleges Online article gave through one of their schools.  They said that their students “stay focused and engaged in their learning by simply giving them a little down time once they achieve tasks” (Best Colleges Online, 2012).  They stated that by giving the students timely breaks that they stay more on task when they are working on schoolwork.  I think this idea can be incorporated into any class no matter whether they support the educational gaming ideas or not!