Including games into daily lessons is important for a student to enjoy the material and be invested in their learning. If you have fun while learning, it is much easier to get students involved and interested in the material. The games also allow students to learn and retain information without even thinking about it. This provides a stress free activity that allows students to learn and feel comfortable doing so. Games can allow students who are not as outgoing to enjoy themselves and step out of their comfort zone. Games also allow students to get to know each other more, which in turn makes the rest of the class easier if they can refer to them for questions or assistance later. The most important part of including games is that everyone has to feel like they are having fun and involved and not left out, while also teaching the content. A game has to be related to the material for it to stick with a student and feel relevant.
Application:An application of this could be when learning about different learning styles and how to study according to them, the learners had to play jeopardy. Instead of it being a digital or projector based jeopardy it could be life-like. The learners would have to go up and take off sheets of paper covering questions (answers) and then respond as a group. They would then keep track of points on the board as we went. This would involve moving to the board, group work and collaboration of ideas between group members, and also applying the knowledge they just gained in a fun interactive way. The sections could be definitions of the learning styles, examples of study tactics, true or false of usefulness of tactics, and an extra category of campus facts and knowledge. Since they would be in groups, the people who struggle with being put on the spot could participate in their smaller group and the more extroverted members of the group could actually go up to the board and say the answers. This would also be a more fun activity, so students may not even realize how much they know or don’t know about the subject and I would be able to gauge their learning based on the activity.
Assessment:For this application of games, I feel like the game is the formative assessment because of how much I would be able to see if they are getting the subject and also if there is anything that needs to be clarified. The students would also get the opportunity to ask questions as we went to clarify anything. The preparation would be time consuming for this activity, but the implementation would be fairly simple. There wouldn’t be much for analysis because I would see as we went if they were understanding the concept.