Blogs on Game-Based Learning

Summer heat, eating hot dogs, and cheering for home runs -- it's baseball season once again. Watching a game and rooting for your favorite team is fun, but there's so much more to baseball. It has the ability to get kids off the couch and moving around outside. It holds even greater potential as a way of modeling healthy lifestyles for youth. Through this popular and beloved game, we can identify lessons for children to take with them both on and off the field, and then implement strategies to teach these lessons.

Just what is a game jam? It is a short event, usually only a day or two, where game developers plan, design and create a short game. Similar to a music jam session, game jams don't involve much pre-planning and rely on immediate idea generation and improvisation. Game design companies have these jam sessions regularly, and while many of the games that happen here are digital, some are paper-based. They usually occur in one physical location to allow for immediate, organic collaboration. While there is an element of competition, most of the work is focused on collaboration towards a common goal.

Children in the 21st century experience media in ways that are vastly different from any previous generation. Social networking, user-created content and video games provide a level of interactivity that was unthinkable a generation ago. As a result, educators are rethinking educational practices that have long been taken for granted. Many have come to the conclusion that the answers they're looking for lie in making video game design a central part of the curriculum.

Access to successful learning for all students is a powerful equalizer that drives superior educational outcomes. The importance of equal access is credited with much of the academic progress in Finland, a country without private schools or standardized tests. "Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality."¹