In
my opinion, gamification is using games to motivate learners to be involved in solving
problems, and during the process of playing game, learners can develop their
competence and skills, thus achieving their study goal. Just as 7 things youshould know about games and learning mentions, it has been long understood that
games have the potential to be applied to teaching and will contribute to the improvement
of students’ study. Meanwhile, games are increasing being employed at colleges
and universities such as the Social Media Innovation Quest which can help
students retain information and GradeCraft which can be used not only in
supplying analytics data but also in political theory and information studies.
Compared
with adult learners, teenagers tend to be more difficult to focus on one thing
for long and easy to shift their attention to other thing. Games can appeal to teenagers’
attention for longer time since they are more interesting than just finish the
academic task. Should we employ games in teenagers’ class? In Technology—“Just”Playing Games? A Look at the Use of Digital Games for Language Learning, Julie considered
that digital game principles offer a way to overcome challenges of the language
classroom which are boring and less dynamic sometimes. As a matter of fact, I found
my students were easy to be distracted and sleepy when I kept talking for about
20 minutes. Sometimes, I had to play games or use other activities to attract
their attention. In
addition, digital game design offers a new perspective to our overall
understanding of language learning and teaching. I can still remember I taught
a word “temple” to my students. One of the students shouted with joy” I know
this word because I come across it when I play computer games”. All of us burst
into laughter. However, I began to think why not combine games with language
study? Maybe it can encourage more students engaged in learning English.
It is
no doubt that the educational game can motivate students develop their
competence and skills. However, if not designed well, educational games may be
viewed as silly by learners and will be waste a lot of time, which is
dangerous. What should we do? In sculpting flow and fiero, Zac Hill considered
that games are popular precisely because they address real human needs and
evoke real human emotions. Flow and fiero are two of the most straightforward
of those. So the educational games should also contain these two features. We can
design “play” along something called an engagement curve, that is to say, to
present challenges to people according to the teaching goal we want them to
achiever. In fact, many language-learning APP can be found now on the internet,
however, it is still a long way to design good educational games and apply them
to the class successfully.
