Tutorial

There are several benefits when sharing your interest in games with colleagues. As mentioned before, the impact of your approach of bringing games to the classrooms will be greater, if you form a group. You will also find out more about games and games culture when several people are exploring this culture and looking for games suitable for teaching.

Playing together, sharing insights into games, getting better at games together and discussing and reviewing games and other aspects of the culture and the games industry has its own value. You get to appreciate what games can do in a different way. You experience the power of cooperative play and of collaborative storytelling maybe. And you might have access to a larger number of games because there are more and diverse devices available within the group. Certain games, like some role playing games (RPGs, like Divinity: Original Sin 2, Pillars of Eternity, etc.) offer a completely different experience when played together. Other cooperative titles might only be playable in a group or a team and due to this are actually especially interesting for teaching, also in terms of social skills. We mentioned Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, others are Unrailed, We Were Here Together, or Tick Tock: A Tale for Two.

Your gaming group is the place where you can test, discuss and play games together. Your colleagues there might have a different background when it comes to their subjects and their expertise and this can even add an extra layer of gaming literacy and digital skills you can cover by being part of that group.

5-1 Gameplay and Let’s Play Videos

One of the major tasks for teachers to find the right game for their class, is the research beforehand. What games are out there, what is their content, how do I play them, are they worth a closer look?

You can find out more about games by looking at games culture itself. YouTube offers Let’s Play-videos and game review videos for probably all games out there. Let’s Plays are what their name says. You can watch people playing through a game. They also provide commentary to the game, explain strategies, help to solve levels and so on. So they are one of the most valuable sources for your research. The number of YouTubers playing games is enormous and not all are of good quality. Start by searching for a game on YouTube and see what you can find. For all the major games, you will find a lot and also videos from very professional and successful YouTubers. They might provide a good starting point for you.

For you and your colleagues, the sources we mentioned like websites or YouTube channels are also a good way to find out about new games, interesting approaches to gameplay or even possible applications in teaching. A gaming group is a little like a book club, and you might be surprised by the endless number of games and the great educational potential of some games you might not even have heard of.

Some YouTube channels, additionally to the ones mentioned in Step 2, we can recommend for finding Let’s Plays or game reviews:

By now, you have probably found a number of games that are interesting for your teaching. You have played some of them and read about others. Some games present challenges to you and cover areas that you are not an expert in. Therefore, all the guides and all the channels we mentioned can be used as a valuable source, too. And starting your gaming group even adds to that, developing expertise together, finding new approaches to a specific game, comparing games and finding connections between what you play and what you would like to teach with your gaming project.

5-2 Gaming groups and gaming literacy

We have described gaming literacy before (see Guidebook p. 66). The skills needed to be a proficient player and a contributing member to games culture are manifold. Especially when you have a look at the biggest game titles and competitive gaming (called Esports), you realize that there is a large ecosystem around these titles beyond wikis and YouTube videos.

These games, like League of Legends, Rocket League, FIFA, or several racing games go much further than other games in terms of community. They are considered a sport or at least competition by their players and therefore a complete ecosystem developed around every single one of these titles, with tournaments, leagues, seasons, marketing, broadcasting, etc. You can see an overview of the Esports related professions in the table below.

To understand or maybe even join this culture demands quite a lot of engagement. If you do not know Esports yet, it is an exciting topic, also when it comes to education, but this is beyond the scope of this course. Still, you and your colleagues might get an insight to this culture, if one member of your gaming group may have already played one of these titles for a while and knows the culture. These games are often played for thousands of hours to be able to compete on a level much higher than casual players. If there are people in your group or maybe even in one of your classes who played or still actively play one of these games, they might give you a first-hand impression of this fascinating culture.

Digital skills and gaming literacy are deeply intertwined. Many gamers found their passion for technology or something else and therefore their future profession through gaming. And gamers and especially creators like modders or tournament platform developers and others drive the development of the games industry to new ideas, new games and new tools. In the context of these parts of games culture you can find a blueprint for modern 21st Century education, interest-driven, high levels of expertise and collaboration across continents as well as completely different professions. The more you get to know games culture and its potential, the more you realize that gamers like these (the autodidacts in the world of gaming who developed a high level of expertise and are often seen as role models by young people today) probably provide a great example for digital learning in the 21st Century in some form or the other. Their approach to education might not be translated to the institution one to one, but their biography and their attitude can show us the way we need to go when modernizing education for the digital age.

If only part of this culture and this level of engagement can be brought to your teaching and be a driving force of learning in your classroom, you can achieve great results with your learners.

Let’s Play

In this part there will be a discription of the process of partners finding the games they used in their project. Answers will be given to questions like:

How did you find the game?
Did you ask others for expertise about games?
What were the conversations at your institution about games after the project with colleagues and the students?

KTANE

In the first steps of our project, all the partners had to do some research about games that could be used for teaching. During one of our meetings (KTANE) came up and we thought that the learners would like to use it and that it could be used even during the online teaching that was held due to the Corona pandemic.

When we tried to find some more information about it, we found that there were also some other teachers that had used the game for teaching from other countries. We read their comments and even came in touch with some of them in order to learn some things about using the game inside the class.

Using games was not something new in our school. Both digital and board games are used during our classes, so this is a conversation that takes place almost every day in our school and especially in our monthly meetings.

Connect Four – the Article Game

The “Connect Four – Article Game” is a self-developed game. The idea came up in discussions with colleagues. Exercises for strengthening grammar, in specific articles are usually very time intensive and boring, because it is repeating and repeating.

Therefore, we were searching for something that is easy to understand, makes fun, takes about 10 minutes and can be implemented in class very easy.

“Connect Four” is a game that most of children already play at home, in nursery and in primary school. The rules are easy to understand.

So our idea was to bring this up on an interactive whiteboard to be able that:

the whole class can watch the game
we can use different nouns each time
the students need / allowed to move

No external person. We distributed and discussed it with other colleagues that work in the field of German as second language.

There were discussions in the team, how we could implement this game in other classes as well, e.g. Maths, English grammar or other German grammar / writing topics.

It was also discussed which other games could be developed on the interactive whiteboard for short group playing in class with the focus upon strengthening knowledge and to get “learning with movement” into the class.

The Reactor Game

Our teachers did know it already. You can find it in many game collections.

We discussed it also with the teachers from the teachers school of applied sciences.

There were discussions in the team, how we could implement this game as a standard for the classes in and around of professional orientation and labour market integration the focus upon strengthening knowledge and to get “learning with movement” into the class.

ACT ESOL

We came across this game by accident through an invite to a training session on a forum. As a Centre we have an interest in how drama and play can be used in language learning and development. We attended a couple of training sessions run by another project who had experimented with ACT ESOL in detail.

We held training sessions with tutors and compared the ACT ESOL approach with the more traditional role play and concluded the former was much more dynamic and involving than the latter because students were giving an aesthetic form to something one of the group had experienced and all the participants were contributing to this recreation.

The students also expressed their enjoyment and an in-depth discussion with one of the learner participants expressed how motivating it was for her learning. She worked shifts and was often tired when coming to class. However, she lost herself in play and learned without realising she was learning.

Lateral Thinking Game

We discovered this game at the Wellcome Institute Play Well exhibition – a reflection and meditation on play

https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/XSg-7xEAACcAGVXc

Due to the simplicity of the game, we didn’t consult on this. Our post-game discussions reflected on how there is merit just in playing a game and then reflecting on language use so that competence emerges through performance rather than precedes it.

Videos Extra Credits:

Game Literacy: Games in Education: Should we Teach Game Basics?

Basic Game Literacy: Why it’s Hard to Learn How to Play

Achievement

1 On our YouTube channel Games in Basic Skills Teaching (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcoEXDpJHzANxBD28ul5D6w) you can find a video series about Game Based Learning and its benefits for Basic Skills Teaching. Go through this series and answer the question

“Why and how do you use your game for teaching?

What are the extra benefits besides achieving the learning objectives with the game?”

2 Going through all these aspects to be considered, you can create a range of complexity for games to implement them into your teaching. Some examples in the guidebook were Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (VR and PC version), Frostrune or the Active Floor application. Try to rank them concerning their complexity using the info you acquired through the last chapters. Select one of the games you chose to go through all the different aspects of integration and put it in context with the other titles.

3 Watch the videos from Extra Credits and summarize their understanding of Game/Gaming Literacy.