Comments on: The next big thing: paper planes and bits

By: David Redpath

David Redpath — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:32:23 +0000

I recently read a book about the Naval War College in the USA in the 1920’s and 30’s.(it is called Playing War), and one of the key things they covered that stuck with me was that the Wargames they played were not meant to determine skill levels or a particular starategy, but were instead largely to get the students to be experts in Estimating a Situation, making a decision, and communicating that to the rest of the team. That seems to me to be key in a lot of educational games, it is the critical thinking skill, in a safe to fail environment, we are really trying to teach.

By: Erik

Erik — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 16:02:08 +0000

Thanks for the comment Michael. And yes, the issue of an ill-suited Education system is well researched, and fortunately, recently is becoming a commonly discussed one too. Games are being put forward as a way to remediate this issue, as you yourself know, but not all welcome the idea. In the meantime we need to continue pushing, creating good games, documenting the results of these games in the classroom, and sharing them with the world 🙂

By: Dr. Michael Sutton

Dr. Michael Sutton — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 18:37:00 +0000

Very insightful case study. Erik, your conclusion resonated so well with me: “And this was one of the questions the students asked me at the end of the retrospective session ‘will it be on the exam?’”
Regretfully we currently ave generations of learners across multi-cultural environments who have not been taught critical thinking, sensemaking, emotional intelligence, decision-making and problem-solving. They have been programmed to memorize useless factoids for an exam, instead of keying into experiential learning and game-based learning to stretch their mental, emotional, and behavioural characteristics.