Education as a Student Teacher

What do students learn when they play games?  More importantly, what do students learn when they create games? A presentation from Scratch, an online computer program that enables children to design and create their own computer games, suggests that students learn vital mathematic and computational ideas. What is also great is the children are learning these concepts in fun and meaningful context.  By creating their own game, students are involved in the design process and use a number of higher order thinking skills.

I developed a game using scratch to be used when teaching Antarctica. However, it was very time consuming. Even though the students learn many skills from creating their own games, it would have to be used very wisely in an educational context. I feel that a lot of students would get very frustrated very quickly if they haven’t had a lot of practice with logical reasoning. And in terms of time, you really need to weigh up the benefits and skills learnt with the huge cost of time.