EDLD 5364 Week 5 Reflection

This week was a good week as we wrapped up this course and completed our team project. Each member contributed to the project and it is great to work with the group of professional in my team. This week’s videos were very enlightening. This week I watched a video from Professor James Paul Gee about gaming as a form of assessment. I never really looked at games as a form of assessing a student’s knowledge or looking at it as a form of higher-level thinking and problem solving. However, after listening to his talk I have a better appreciation of those that use games. He stated that gaming is a process of problem solving where the student gets immediate feedback to their game experience. If they fail at a level it takes them back to their last known place marker and lets them try again. The student experiments with the game until they figure out the problem and can solve it to pass to the next level. Education should be the same. Students should use gaming to solve problems. As Professor Gee stated, “chemistry class is a game where the students learn the game of chemistry”. It would be great if we could make all classes run in this manner. All the other videos were taking about how gaming is becoming a new way of learning. Teaching should be about learning how to solve complex problems using a game based format. I now have a great appreciation of those students that game. I also let my students use a program called Study Island that has a gaming section that once their daily and weekly work has been completed, they are allowed to play on the game side. I think that they students are learning more because it is making them think in the way they look at life in the gaming world.