A Young Teacher’s Guide To Educational Games

There are three types of games that may useful in helping students develop different skills in problem solving/critical thinking as well as knowledge and basic skills. They are:

1. Commercial games;
2. Specially designed and commercially produced educational games; and
3. Teacher devised games designed to fit into a particular topic.

All games have some advantages:

• Obviously, fun, as the children learn;
• Learning by stealth, i.e. the children think it’s a game rather than school work;
• Learning through cooperation with others;
• Learning by observing others;
• Often hands-on, i.e. tactile and visual; and
• Often discussion between participants can lead to further learning.

There are disadvantages/difficulties especially with commercial games and some educationally produced games. They include:

• They are expensive.
• They often take too much time to get a result.
• Teacher must be extremely vigilant with collecting all games and checking all parts have been returned. Otherwise, an expensive game becomes unusable.
• Storage and borrowing practices may present usage problems.
• Time can become an issue in organising distribution, collection, return and storage of games so they are put in the too hard basket.
• Some of these types of games take many hours to Deathknight  to play well.

Therefore, games need to be:

• Relevant to the learning required in the topic;
• Easy to learn to play effectively in a short time;
• Time friendly in the busy environment of the modern classroom;
• Easy to store, replace and check;
• Played by as little as two people and up to four to be effective;
• Can be whole class ones as well; and
• Not too reliant on their own consumable items or have consumable items that are easy to copy (with a licence to do so, if necessary).

Teacher Designed Games – Learning By Stealth

In my experience, teacher designed games are the most effective in the classroom. Some have evolved from well-known games such as Bingo and other games of chance.

The advantages of teacher designed games are:

1. They are topic specific.
2. Cheap to make. Often only photocopying is required.
3. Few resources are necessary, e.g. dice and counters.
4. Rules can start in a simple form and be enlarged or made more difficult to suit the class’s development.
5. Rules can be changed to suit the situation, i.e. flexibility is an advantage if the game does not work successfully initially.
6. Time needed is determined by the teacher as necessary.
7. Results can be related to the topic you are teaching.
8. New ideas can be deduced from the games to enhance the students’ learning, especially in games of chance.
9. All students can have success. It does not depend on their achievement level in the subject.
10. The games can be used to strengthen understanding in your topic.

I have included below a game called “Buzz” that I saw used by a trainee teacher. I don’t know where it came from but I have written a simple version of what I saw. I have used it, with many variations and complications, when doing relief teaching. You will see it has many of the advantages mentioned above.