What is it about?
As a variation on game-based learning, we propose the concept of ‘gameful learning’ as a framework that encourages improvisation, playfulness, and social interaction, and which takes into account the unique contingencies of individual people and specific content. We describe gameful learning in terms of three elements: attitude, identity, and ignorance. Three cases of gameful learning are examined across diverse learning environments: a fourth grade science class studying matter, a secondary world history class studying the Middle Ages, and an educational technology graduate programme. Cross-case analysis reveals how gameful learning elements relate to attitudes of agency and social necessity, becoming a game designer, and embracing ignorance for learning.
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Why is it important?
Gameful learning is a means for perceiving how educators are creative professionals capable of being held to high expectations for generative intellectual work - and not just technical skill at curriculum delivery. Though educators often push against the adoption of particular standards or tools, gameful learning can help researchers to reveal how teachers adapt – and actively design – curricula and tools that emphasise higher-order thinking skills, broad areas of knowledge, and process-oriented activity.
Perspectives
Jeremiah (Remi) Holden is a teacher educator and learning scientist whose interests and design-based research concerns educator learning across settings, the design and play of games, and mobile learning. Visit www.remiholden.com and connect with Remi via Twitter at @remiholden.
Dr Jeremiah H Kalir
University of Colorado Denver
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Gameful learning as a way of being, International Journal of Learning Technology, January 2014, Inderscience Publishers,
DOI: 10.1504/ijlt.2014.064492.
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Resources
How can teachers use videogames to teach their students mathematics?
Imagine a veteran mathematics educator eager to refine her practice. Alternatively, what of the first-year teacher confident in her ability to adapt new technologies to communicate, problem-solve, and share information. How might either identify what makes video games and gameplay effective in a mathematics classroom? What are the advantages of game-based learning in contrast to more traditional instructional strategies, and can pitfalls be avoided, successes recognized, and challenges mitigated?
Playful possibilities for assessment: Fluffy ducks and the queen’s gambit
Is it possible for anyone to regard assessment as “fun”? Is it possible that we have hamstrung ourselves into boredom and resistance to assessing student learning by forgetting our love of play? How might the delightful aspects of games transform our approaches to assessment? Here, SEHS Lecturer Remi Holden (winner of the inaugural Bruce and Lillian Wright Online Teaching Award) explores these questions as he describes how “playful teaching and learning” has become central to the work of the Educational Technology Master of Arts Program.
Mobile inquiry-as-play in mathematics teacher education
This study describes the feasibility of designing and fostering pre-service teacher inquiry at the intersection of community and disciplinary engagement. Mapping My Math (MMM), a game-based and mobile learning activity, guided pre-service teachers in playfully exploring mathematics featured in the everyday activities of people and places and creatively representing this inquiry with digital media. This study draws from design-based research that examined the role of place, digital media and mobility in mathematics teacher education. Design narrative methods describe how MMM was created, implemented and refined to support disciplinary inquiry across settings given the evolution of tools, activities and practices. The study and design narrative address the following question: How can game-based and mobile learning be designed to support pre-service teachers’ disciplinary inquiry of everyday mathematics? Findings shared in this study’s design narrative attend to the quality of pre-service teachers’ inquiry-as-play, or expressive mobility situated among learners’ social and material relations, disciplinary concepts and the built environment. Implications from this study concern the role of mobile learning in mathematics teacher education to connect school, community and online settings; the potential of gameful design to impact pre-service teacher learning across settings; and the importance of fostering disciplinary inquiry whereby pre-service teachers can “navigate” their own learning. Originality/value – Game-based and mobile learning designs, like MMM, can create the conditions for cross-setting mobility as generative of inquiry-as-play in mathematics teacher education. MMM encouraged pre-service teachers to playfully leverage disciplinary practices that shaped new relationships with mathematics, their city and the mathematics of place and community.
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