Games have the potential to transform learning by making it student-centered, complex, and intrinsically motivating. When designed well, games can engage students in solving real-world problems through interactive problem-solving and collaboration. Game-based learning approaches like project-based learning embed critical thinking, communication, and deeper learning within an authentic and engaging context. Educators are exploring how to apply game mechanics and principles of game design to better capture students' interests and promote active, self-directed, and collaborative styles of learning.

1. Learning with Games:
Making Learning Irresistible
Cathie Howe
Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre

2. What should learning look like?

3. What should learning look like?
• Student centred
• Independence valued • abstractness
• Agile • complexity (inter
• open & accepting relationships)
• complex (rich variety of • variety
resources, media, ideas, • study of people
methods, tasks) Learning • study of methods of
inquiry
• Physical/virtual
Environ- Content
ment What students
Where learn
students learn
Product Process • higher levels of thinking
• real problems • creative /critical
• real audiences Thinking /divergent thinking
Result of
processes used
• real deadlines learning • open-endedness
to learn
• transformations (rather • group interaction
than regurgitation) • variable pacing
• Appropriate evaluation • variety of learning
• debriefing
• freedom of choice
Maker Model

4. Imagine
Imagine having our students being so engaged
in a complex, goal orientated activity, that self-
consciousness disappears and time becomes
distorted and they do it, not for external rewards
but simply for the exhilaration of doing!

5. Video Game Facts
In Australia:
• 92% households have a gaming device
• 95% homes with children < 18 have a
gaming device
• 47% of gamers are female
• Average age of video game players is 32
• 57% of gamers play every day
• 88% of parents who play games, play with
their children
Key Findings DA12
Bond University/iGEA

6. Video games are
increasingly
recognised as
becoming the
literacy of the 21st
Century
Chris Swain, Associate Research Professor

7. What players attain through video games?
Positive Emotions
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishment
P.E.R.M.A
Dr. Martin Seligman

8. What do we learn when we
play, design and build games?
Problem Judgement,
Communic-
solving skills analysis &
ation skills &
& strategic
networking
negotiation thinking
Narrative Improved
Non – linear
skills & attention,
thinking
transmedia vision &
patterns
navigation cognition

9. Games and Learning
• Game Based Learning:
- Applying the core
mechanics of games to
other contexts
- Using games as a stimulus to
frame learning activities
• Game Design

10. Games and Learning
What if schools implement a learning model that
uses the intrinsic qualities of game design and play,
to reimagine what learning might look?
Would we harness greater human potential in creativity, participation and effort?

11. Reimagining learning through games?
Core principles of how games work that can transform learning. They:
1. Create a need to know organising learning around solving complex
problems set in engaging contexts.
2. Offer a space of possibility through the design of rules for learners to
tinker, explore, hypothesise and test assumptions.
3. Build opportunities for authority and expertise to be shared and
distributed, i.e. learning is reciprocal among learners, mentors and
teachers.
4. Support multiple overlapping pathways towards mastery
Professor Katie Salen

12. Do games have the power to solve the world’s problems?
What if we immersed
our students in
designing games to
tackle the world’s most
urgent problems?
What would learning
look like?
active, self-directed, goal orientated,
Photo by xJason.Rogersx’s
authentic, interest driven, just-in-time

13. Do Games have the Power to
Solve the World’s Problems?
Foldit
Solve puzzles for science through folding proteins
Foldit gamers solve AIDS puzzle that baffled scientists
for a decade.
http://techland.time.com/2011/09/19/foldit-gamers-
solve-aids-puzzle-that-baffled-scientists-for-decade/

14. Game Design
Curriculum and QTF Links
Crafting a Deconstructing Reviewing
backstory games Designing games Building games
games
English English English English English
Metalanguage Science & Science $ Science & Science &
Student technology Technology technology technology
direction Deep Maths Maths PDHPE
understanding PDHPE
PDHPE Metalanguage
Engagement Deep
Deep Student direction
Higher order Understanding understanding
thinking Explicit quality
Higher order Higher order criteria
Metalanguage thinking thinking
Substantive Metalanguage
communication Substantive
Metalanguage communication
Engagement Engagement
Student direction Student self-
regulation
Background
knowledge Student direction
Knowledge Social Support
integration Knowledge
integration
Connectedness

15. Pedagogical Implications: Inquiry Learning
Students:
• Pose own questions
• Explore answers
• Solve problems
• Jointly construct and
share knowledge
• Collaborate e.g. design
Inquiry learning allows students
the opportunity to develop
creative solutions to open
ended challenges, problems
and questions.

16. A model of delivery: Project Based Learning
Project Based Learning (PBL) as a teaching and learning model:
• creates the need to know critical content
• based on authentic learning activities
• starts with a driving question, problem or challenge - key to
arousing curiosity
• engages and empowers students
• work autonomously (usually in
groups)
• construct their own learning,
• culminates in realistic, student
created products

17. Game Based Learning example:
MacICT’s Games and Learning with Little Space Heroes
“What will it take to move classroom literacy practices
and instruction into the 21st century?
It will take teachers who are skilled, excited, passionate about the effective use
of ICT or teaching and learning.
It will take a curriculum that integrates new, exciting literacies and instruction.
It will take courageous and bold initiatives that include yet unimagined
information and communication technologies
and these will result in the development of unimagined new literacies.”
Associate Professor Kaye Lowe
http://web2.macquarieict.schools.nsw.edu.au/blog/2012/03/17/games-and-learning-with-little-space-heroes/

18. Game Design example:
MacICT’s Level Up! Good Game Design
Bootcamp and Masterclass
Learning how to use technology is not enough; the heart of 21st century learning
is about becoming a proficient and independent lifelong learner.
Game design offers a unique platform to address essential skills for learning:
• creativity and innovation
Boot Camp and Masterclass information
• critical thinking,
• iterative problem solving
• communication, collaboration
• information, media and ICT literacy
Shift thinking from that of
a player to a designer.

19. Applying Game Mechanics to teach Game Design:
Invasion of the Shadow Plague
WILL YOU SAVE US?
A narrative based metagame centred in a Wordpress blog teaching
students to design and build using Microsoft Kodu Game Lab

20. Example: Google Maps + Edmodo = Game
Learning through Design
GeoQuest with Google Maps
• How do you like to learn?
• Decide on learning outcomes of GeoQuest (clear goal)
• Edmodo group code, create badge
• Create backstory
• Design challenges – answer gives one part of Edmodo group code
 Divide Map
 Work in pairs
• Build Map
― One Gmail account
 MyMaps in Google Maps
 Export (KML)
 Import into one map

21. Summary: What learning should look like?
• Active
• Self-directed
• Goal orientated
• Authentic
• Interest driven
• Just-in-time

22. Summary:
What should learning environments look like?
• be interactive
• provide ongoing feedback
• grab and sustain attention
• have appropriate and
adaptive levels of
challenge
• Multiple pathways to
success
• be agile

23. Contact Details
catherine.howe@det.nsw.edu.au
http://au.linkedin.com/pub/cathie_howe/12/852/760
@cathie_h
Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre. Building C5B
Macquarie University
macictsupport@det.nsw.edu.au
02 9850 4310
Twitter: @macict