How Video Games Can Serve Educational Purposes

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Gamification positively affected many realms with education being on the forefront. The combination of non-gaming contexts with gameplay motivates students to perform better. It brings them more meaningful experiences in which action, perception, emotions – everything works together. Our colleagues from IndieGames.Download shared their study of how video games help education and selected the best examples available for download.

Expensive Experiences for Free

Perhaps, there’s no such a child who has never broken anything to look what’s inside. Such experiments are valuable for developing explorational skills, understanding causation, and seeing how things really work from the inside.

Some games provide a safe environment for things like that. For instance, in Disassembly 3D, you can detach any part of an electronic or mechanic device to understand how it’s fastened, and what the function is. The current library includes vehicles (from cars to space stations), electronics (phones, computers, home appliances), and buildings. All objects are recreated in detail so that you could see the real guts of everything.

Similar actions are performable in PC Building Simulator. The difference is that you are required to make computers work instead of breaking them into pieces. It’s an entirely realistic simulation of an average custom PC assembler who has to receive orders, shop components, install hardware and software, and provide product support services. Every little detail is licensed by hardware manufacturers, so you can apply the knowledge from the game in real-life.

Clearly, in real life, it’s impossible or very costly to do anything like this with actual objects. Video games let you and your children explore the world of technology without threats to health, environment, and family budget.

Unexpected English Lessons

Any English learner can largely benefit from playing any computer game in English. In general, games aren’t meant to be language courses, but they all have dubbed dialogues and synchronous subtitles. More for that is hidden in multiplayer titles.

According to the ESL classroom case study by Kanda University of International Studies, in-game multiplayer activities influence students to use multiple language skills per session. In-game goals push players to break communication barriers faster than in other circumstances. No many students have an opportunity to travel or meet native speakers, so online gaming seems to be a perfect substitute for these activities. So, next time, when you ask your kid to shut down the PC and go for a walk, think about instilling more fruitful gaming preferences instead of prohibiting.

Brighten-Up History Classes

Visualizing is one of the most efficient methods of learning history. Studying battles with special maps and obtaining large historical periods with documentaries have joined programs of schools and universities long ago. The huge flaw of the methods is their focus retention rate. The monotonous narration of lecturers leaves little knowledge in the end, so students need repetition or and additional courses.

The real-time strategy (RTS) genre offers players to touch events. Titles like Age of Empires, Sid Mayer’s Civilization, Stronghold, Total War, and Cossacks cover different ages and allow to participate in precisely recreated battles. Moreover, you can explore relevant economics, head around dominant personalities’ lives and their deeds, and see how things actually looked like those days.

Another example is the Assassin’s Creed series. Though it’s an action game with fictional characters and battle mechanics, it also includes massive knowledge of European and American culture. Of course, the studies for these games lack depth and precision sometimes, but still an excellent form of engagement into studying and understanding history.

Memorizing things through games works similarly in any genre. Unlike movies and lections, you always have to do something to make events progress. It means that gamers are indispensable mediators who have to remain focused all the time. This condition totally removes the probability of sleeping in the back row!

Logic and Imagination

This field literally includes dozens of games because the sandbox genre is one of the most popular among PC gamers. In such games as Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory, Terraria, and Scrap Mechanic you are free to be imaginative and construct nearly anything. Minecraft and Terraria are leading building sandboxes with simple but realistic physics and basic electronics. Factorio and Satisfactory emulate manufacturing economics, engaging players with competitive and survival elements.

Finally, Scrap Mechanic is our favorite one at IndieGames.Download. This open-world engineering simulator provides a physically relevant environment in which you can construct all-terrain vehicles, aircraft, robots, weapons, and any-purpose buildings. The best point in all these games is an option to share creations and test projects of others without any limits. They’re like next century Lego sets.

Programming Practice

Qualified programmers are highly demanded personnel because of the pervasive computerization. This specialization has many branches and progress degrees, but you have to start from basic operations anyway. They include coding, diagnostics, and problem-solving.

With TIS-100, you can get acquainted with all these tasks with a slightly simplified emulation of processor cores and command console. It’s a realistic model of how the ground operations in any computer look like. Everything consists of digital sequences that constitute tasks. The mission is always the same – read out the code, detect a problem, and solve it by recoding the failed segments. At the same time, you can come up with a bunch of different solutions and check out how good your logics and maths are. This game is recommended to all programming beginners as an excellent trainer of realistic circumstances.

The less complicated method to get familiar with this job is visual programming. It allows you to operate processes in a descriptive graphical environment with clear and more-or-less tangible objectives.

In Shenzhen I/O, you can try the role of an electronics engineer who has to deal with low-level programming for customer-oriented products. It’s an opportunity to understand the principles of circuit elements functioning. Glitchspace puts the same problem but adds up first-person shooter (FPS) gameplay to make it more dynamic.

Be Versatile

There’s no such a thing that’s obtainable through a single book or a university course, meaning there should be no end to seeking new sources of knowledge and practice. The untapped potential of video games in education is extremely promising, and you can start benefiting from it right away.