The German educator Flaubert was the founder of the kindergarten movement, and he believed that education should be adapted to nature and conform to the nature of children. The game can respond to the needs of children's natural development, is an important factor in the development of children's life, is the development of children's inner nature of the spontaneous expression, so early childhood education should be combined with the game.
Montessori, the famous Italian educator, also believes that education should be responsive to the needs of early childhood development, young children start to move from the environment to receive stimuli to accumulate external experience, and the accumulation of this experience with the help of the game, so the game is a necessary stage of early childhood development. Play enables children to express and fulfill their vitality and to develop further.
Dewey's doctrine of pragmatic education is a milestone in the history of education. In Dewey's view, "education is life" "school is society", school education must be connected with life, especially with the real life of children. To this end, it is necessary to learn from experience, that is, "learning by doing". He attaches great importance to the position of games in education, and believes that on the one hand, games should be included as part of the school curriculum; on the other hand, games should be used as one of the forms of coursework in teaching, so that it is easy to establish the connection between experience and knowledge.
In a nutshell, the seniors have analyzed games from different angles, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, culture, and pedagogy. Let us have an intuitive feeling, at least in the level of children's development, the game plays an important role in promoting children's physical and mental development, cognitive development, social development and emotional development, to a certain extent, we can even say: "the game is life, the game is education.
Since the 1950s, electronic games (including arcade, computer, network games, etc.) have gradually become popular all over the world, naturally attracting researchers from psychology, education, sociology, medicine and other disciplines to conduct in-depth studies on games and their educational value from different angles. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Game-To-Teach program, Indiana University's Quest Atlantis program, Harvard University's River City program, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong's VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment), EduVenture, and other research projects at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
From these research projects, we can see that, although the game will be used in education to face many difficulties and obstacles, but it does have a lot of educational value: the use of games of fun can stimulate the learner's motivation to learn; you can learn a variety of knowledge in the game; you can cultivate the hand-eye interaction of the basic ability; you can develop problem-solving skills, collaboration, creativity and other higher-order abilities; you can promote the development of emotions, attitudes and values; you can promote It can promote the cultivation of emotion, attitude and value; it can promote experiential learning, inquiry learning, collaborative learning, research learning and other learning styles; and it can be used to build a gamified learning environment.
In the VISOLE project carried out by Prof. Li Fangle and Li Haowen of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the value of games was experienced from actual research: firstly, the near-real situation, the real task and the fun of the game do help to stimulate students' motivation to learn; secondly, the game does provide students with a near-real "experiential" learning environment, so that students can have a better understanding of the game and learn from the game. Secondly, games do provide students with an almost real "experiential" learning environment, allowing them to "experience" rather than just "know", and letting them discover, analyze and solve problems on their own, and they can provide a learning environment for students to formulate hypotheses and test them. The game can provide students with a hypothesis, and to verify the hypothesis of the learning environment; again, although it is a virtual farm environment, but also let the students have a better understanding of agriculture, the farmers have more knowledge of the hard work, and in the game of success and failure also let the students experience a wealth of emotions emotions experience.
In the many educational values of the game, it can be summarized into three levels of educational value: game motivation, game thinking and game spirit.
Game motivation. The reason why people think of using games in education is that they want to stimulate students' motivation to learn through the fun of games, so this is the core and most basic value of games, as well as the most operational value. There have been many studies that have shown that games do help to motivate students to learn. For example, Barab et al. used Quest Atlantis as a research environment to compare the effects of narrative learning (SBL) and game-based learning (GBL). The study showed that 95% of SBL students studied for high grades or to complete teacher-assigned tasks, whereas only 34% of GBL students studied for high grades or to complete tasks, and a whopping 65% of students said they studied simply because they "wanted to.
It is important to note that the word "game motivation" is used here to include the value of games in terms of knowledge, ability, emotion, and attitude. For example, now all sectors of society attach great importance to the development of creativity, humanist psychologists believe that in the game, children are spontaneous, free, unrestrained, and this is the basic conditions or prerequisites for creation.
Play thinking. As the child grows older, it is not necessary to use pure play, but the elements or mechanisms of play can be used in learning, which is called playful thinking.
Gamification has been used extensively in business in recent years. For example, a subway station in Sweden had the ingenious idea of designing each step of the staircase as a piano key, and the sound of the piano can be played when you walk on it, which attracted a lot of people to walk on the stairs, and at the same time achieved the purpose of energy saving and environmental protection and promotion of people's movement. There is also WeChat red packets, it can give a group of people issued a random amount of red packets, this small gamification design greatly inspired people's curiosity and challenge, the result all of a sudden make the traditional red packet activity into a red packet grabbing game, objectively promote the rapid development of WeChat.
The application of gamification in education has also been around for a long time. For example, some learning websites now use elements such as points, badges, and leaderboards to inspire children to challenge themselves. Once to love the course of the "gamification teaching method" catechism as an example, based on the mechanism, dynamic, aesthetics (MDA) game design framework, and choose to real people hand-painted background, increase the story elements, increase the role of role-playing and so on, the catechism course video gamification design, the effect is good. In fact, in traditional teaching, teachers also often use gamification thinking skills, such as children's good performance to send a small prize ticket, or send a small red flower, which is also the use of game thinking.
The core of gamification, in fact, is still to play the game to help stimulate the characteristics of the engine, but here to stimulate the surface of the leisure and entertainment, escape, venting and other motives, more is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Malone (Malone) and others mentioned the challenge of the curiosity of the competition, such as the deep motivation. In the practical application of not necessarily stick to the external form of the game, but in the teaching, management of the various aspects of the activities organically into the game elements or game design or game concept.
Game spirit. The game is fake, but people treat the game is very serious and serious. Games are more about the process than the result. Mr. Gu Mingyuan once said that education nowadays puts too much emphasis on the result rather than the process, so is it possible for learners to treat the learning process like a game? No matter what the result is, it is enough to study hard and seriously every day. This is the highest level and most meaningful value of games - the spirit of games. The so-called spirit of play refers to a state of existence of human beings, which means that human beings are able to break away from the shackles and restrictions of reality and actively pursue essential freedom, and it is one of the realms in which human beings pursue spiritual freedom. Simply put, the spirit of the game is the free pursuit of essential and spiritual freedom under the premise of laws and regulations.
This is certainly true for children, as Flaubert said: play is the highest stage of children's development, and the purest nature and innermost thoughts of human beings are developed and expressed in play. In fact, this is also true for young people and even adults. In the view of Hu Yichenga, a pioneer in the study of games, many behaviors of human society can be linked to games, and people are essentially gamers. And the German poet Schiller even thinks: "Only when a man is fully human, he plays; only when a man plays, he is fully human", the point of view from a certain point of view also illustrates the value of the spirit of play.
Of course, in order to play the spirit of the game, we should try to give learners some freedom, so that they can freely and voluntarily choose to learn what they are interested in, and choose their own learning methods.
The above three are both related and different: game motivation is the most basic and operative value, which emphasizes the use of games to stimulate learning motivation; game thinking is beyond the form of games, emphasizing the design of non-game learning activities as "games"; and the spirit of the game is the most meaningful value, emphasizing that learners treat the spirit of the game with the same care and attention as the game. Playfulness is the most meaningful value, emphasizing that learners approach the learning process and outcomes with the spirit and attitude of play. The core connection between the three is deep intrinsic motivation.
Currently, catechism, microclasses, and flipped classrooms are very hot, but there is actually a premise implied behind the various learning styles, which emphasize more on the positive and active nature of students' learning than the traditional teaching models of the past. If students do not have a strong intrinsic motivation to learn, no matter how good the curriculum is, no matter how good the learning method is, it will be useless, and independent learning will not happen. Comparing the demand for learning and the core educational value of games, considering the changes of the times and the characteristics of contemporary youth, it is obvious that game-based learning (or educational games) has a broad imagination. Perhaps game-based learning can really work with mobile learning, flipped classroom, big data, brain science and other technologies to reshape the way of learning and return to the essence of education, so that every child, teenager, and even adults can be happily immersed in learning. The game is a great way to get the most out of the game, and it's a great way to get the most out of the game, and it's a great way to get the most out of the game.
In fact, the game of learning these years, the development of particularly fast, China Association for Educational Technology Education Games Committee and Peking University Learning Science Laboratory and other units have done a lot of research and practical work, Beijing Shunyi Yang Town Center Primary School, Shenzhen Baoan District Tianjiao Primary School, Futian District, Shenzhen, the experimental area in the relevant aspects. The education authorities in Shanghai, Jilin and Chongqing are also actively promoting game-based learning. The goal of these experiments is to make learning more scientific, happier and more effective.