Educational Gaming Part 2

Well, this week I've played the Nintendo Wii (sports/fit). There was this bowling game and how do we play it? Play it as if we are really in the bowling area! So cool! If I have a Wii at home, I can just practice anytime I want without going out of my house! Then we played a boxing game and another game that is testing on our balancing. So, I found out that the similarity across the 3 games was that it requires physical action as if we were playing the real game in a virtual world!
So i think that, this Nintendo Wii (sports/fit) might more be suitable for athletes for practice purpose to enhance their psychomotor skills and coordination! Well for people me who is lazy to go out to enjoy sports, Nintendo Wii gives me the opportunity to exercise at my own comfort zone. Of course there are also other benefits from this such as to inculcate the never-say-die attitude because we get to try all over again after game over!

Next we proceeded to station 5 where I've learnt that there are actually 36 Gee's learning principles of games! That's a lot but my group was focusing on the 9th principle: self-knowledge principle. Self-knowledge refers to one's particular mental state, including beliefs, desires and sensation. This principle is emphasizing on people learn more about themselves and their current potential capacities. For example, before attending today's lesson, all these while I thought that I could not play bowling well, but after the game session, I've discovered that I was able to score!

The article, How to choose and use appropriate computer games in the classroom, facinated me because I've always wanted to know what type of game is considered as educational and that has a balance of some aspects of fun and some aspects of engage learning. Because to me, students tend to be blinded by "fun" while gaming and end up learning nothing. From the article, countries such as the UK actually maintain a standard of the contents of games by filtering out what is considered as unsuitable using the PEGI scheme. Games are actually classified into different genres ranging from action adventure, management games, role playing games to world buiding games. So for educational gaming, it is important to note that content of the game must match the requirements of the curriculum of subject and the objective of the intended lessons. The game itself must be able to deliver a few functions to the players such as promoting team collaboration and has a few elements of the Gee's learning principle of games. Other issues that can be considered is the length of time taken to become familiar with the basic control of the game impact the time needed to address certain learning strategies. I also feel that games should have access to different levels of complexity and scenarios to test how far we can go.