Digital game-based learning: why, when and how

• Autor(a) principal: Rito, P. N.
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.19/6575
• topic: Game-based learning; Classroom and videogames; Introduction; State of the art

Video games have been around for more than sixty years. Learning through videogames is a topic that has been addressed by teachers and educators of which has been made various experiments at all educational levels, starting at the pre-school to higher education. However this is a tool that not everyone knows how to use, for the vicissitudes of initial training, or even because private motivations about liking it or because of a strong motivation to not apply videogames in certain curricular activities. For the video game industry and developers, there is more and more a close relationship, even a union between entertainment and education. It is well known that there are great differences between listening, for example, to a history teacher, who narrates an episode according to his knowledge and plays a video game on the same subject. The video game allows the student to play the role of a historical character or a nation, making decisions and observing the consequences of their decisions in other characters or nations. It is necessary to reflect upon the professionals who are coming out of the universities, and that will be the future teachers. It must be set up conditions for them (educators) to have these experiences of using video games, perhaps incorporating in their curriculum activities with these tools. With the evolution of technologies, support for playing video games has also changed, and the digital format is increasingly accessible and multi-platform. When they emerged videogames support tools were too basic and expensive but now with the resources of smartphones or tablets, we can have a group of students focused on developing activities on these platforms, through multimedia applications like video games. Moreover, nowadays the students are digital natives subjects who have a propensity to use any technology at any time. Any learning that may be within the reach of education professionals will always depend on the strength of these professionals to change, factors related to the conditions that organizations provide for these activities and policies that are adopted to influence the use. This work is intended to present results of a literature review about the topic, presenting the justifications that arise about the use of videogames in the classroom and how they can be a supporting tool to the teaching. It is also important to identify case reports and analyze how these tools can be used by those who are more resistance in the use.