Hybrid Pedagogy: Games

http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/Play_Games_Gamification_Active_Learning.html

Above is a link to the article I read from the Hybrid Pedagogy site, which was called It’s Time to Play: Games, Gamification, and Active Learning. The reason this article seemed attractive to me was because I’d already been doing so much on video games in this class, with Gee’s book and with my article group, so I figured I might as well keep on with that. Though it turned out this was not talking so much about video games, but about games in general. In fact, it talked about the creativity involved with even things like the imaginary games of children (since we all remember playing Doctor and House when we were little). I was intrigued when the author said that his children, aged four and six, managed to mix together the games Candyland and Snakes and Ladders. It’s amazing to me that kids that age can have so much ingenuity. But then it also talked about how his young son loves the game Angry Birds, but how it didn’t have the same room for creativity that other games did because there’s only one way to win. Basically, the article talked about play and innovation in the classroom. It discussed the addition of “play” in teaching as an issue of access and it also talked about the classifications of what knowledge is considered useful or important, which has been a lot of what we’ve been talking about since the start of this class. It was an interesting article.