Discussion: A new generation of learners has difficulty sitting still in a classroom listening to a teacher lecture, and do not have the patience to read a novel, yet they can sit and play a video game for hours. Through mobile games they can memorize move combinations, navigate maps with ease, and create complex worlds.
523 Inspiration: With the concept of mobile games in mind, authentic educational games for a variety of topics or subjects are being developed for the mobile user – whether it is integrated into a collaborative classroom experience, or an on-the-go way of learning. Mobile Games could become essential for many kinds of learning contexts, and for reaching those learners who have difficulty in a traditional learning setting.
Mobile games have many attributes of what we want 21st-century educational experiences to be. They are engaging, prompting users to pour huge amounts of focus and energy into them. Users come back to them constantly, intently focused on them to the exclusion of all else! Mobile games encourage you to improve your techniques while rewarding persistence and focus and can be very beautiful in their design and artistic vision.
Unfortunately, as Jazz alludes to in this thread, they also pose many challenges and can have negative consequences for users. They can be highly addicting by design, driving users toward endless microtransactions and rewarding compulsive, repetitive actions. They are usually commercial by design, with no greater goal than to drive engagement and propagate the reach of their publishers and owners. So how do we rethink mobile games as something that can be positive for educators and learners?
I believe the answer lies in constructionism. I have played, assigned, and critiqued many educational games over the years. Often they are shallow and flat; they offer some of the visuals and stimuli of traditional mobile games, but lack the depth or educational design to make them useful as a contemporary learning tool. What I picture is a constructionist approach that leverages user-friendly (often free) design tools such as block coding and AI-assisted coding in languages like Python to allow learners to be the ones creating the games. These games would be reflections of their understanding, and allow them to explore content while creating meaningful experiences. The games they create would help dictate the design of a particular course.
Mobile games have severely impacted my classroom. I had students spend 30+ minutes playing a game on their phone instead of doing their work. When I told them to put it away, (for the 5th time) they just put it on their lap and continue to play the games. This is extremely frustrating to deal with because it seems like all the work I have put into preparing for the class and creating the activities and assignments just goes to waste.
With this said, I think we can make use of games within our classrooms and have students actually want to participate. While right now it looks like Kahoots and Quizziz and Blookets, the hope is that we can take it even further. Perhaps even have students make the games themselves through apps like Genially. I am interested in learning how we can optimize mobile games in the classroom and have students realize that they can learn through mobile games.
What do you think?
Jasmine