The study “Empowering Educators: Supporting Student Progress in the Classroom with Digital Games” developed by Jan Plass in NYU and Barry Fishman of Michigan University, affirm that more than half of the teachers (57%) use digital games weekly or frequently in learning and 18% use them daily. Despite this data, the perception of video games in classrooms is not always positive. Many teachers are afraid to be substituted by digital avatars.
However this is not the objective of educational game developers or pro-tech educators. Most of them want to create a tool to help education professionals to make their work easier and with higher impact. However many people are still worried about the use of technology as a cost reduction process of automation. Maybe this fear is not absurd. According to the American education researcher Diane Ravitch, initiatives as the privatization of public schools to offer more possibilities, can end turning into potential problems like perceiving education as a business or an industry and teachers as factory workers.
The impact that Ed Techs and education technology specialists may have in our kids, when we mistakenly prioritize in the high impact at low cost can be a bit alarming . This criteria should not have more weight than other factors that guarantee the education. The economic scalability of game-based learning is not the only one advantage. Game-based learning uses interactive simulation to combine the content and the context, in a way that students do not just learn with the facts, but also with the way they apply the facts with other people and in a specific environment.
Games, make easier strengthen the power of the game and the creativity, the creation of a teaching methodology based on learning by discovering (exploration) instead of direct learning (class, Conferences…) This study, shows evidence that game-based learning offers the possibility of a better learning evaluation. This means that it also helps to make easier in-classroom interactions, traditionally the basis of good learning. It is important to keep in mind that is not a matter of choosing between online and in classroom learning, but in an effective combination of both.