Games have an important role to play in many areas of education. In our Literacy and Maths Programs for example, we use a wide range of educational games to help our students learn various facts, rules and procedures.
Games also help children develop socially and emotionally.
Why Use Games in Education?
After a number of failures and bad experiences, many learners develop a chronic stress syndrome around learning in particular areas – so they go into panic mode in formal learning situations. As a result, thinking is turned off, and the student attempts to learn parrot fashion if at all. To understand how they feel, think of an area that you have not succeeded with learning – say maths, advanced word processing, spreadsheets, juggling, dancing, or giving a speech.
A well constructed game can be a good way to get around these emotional blockages and so enable the student to build some skills and confidence in the area.
Good games, played well, work because they provide a challenge that can be overcome using focussed thinking and conscious development of strategy and skills.
However, if success in the game is beyond the capabilities of the players, they will give up and feel like failures. This will compound the learning problems we are trying to fix.
How to Play Games in a Way That Will Help Your Child With Learning
To be educational, games must be played with sportsmanship, not gamesmanship.
Sportsmanship is an attitude of enjoying the game for its own sake, with proper consideration for fairness, friendship and respect for your competitors. The focus is educational because it is on developing one’s own skills. Winning, although important, is not the main focus of the game. Sportsmanship involves celebrating the skill development of yourself, AND your competitors.
In gamesmanship on the other hand, the focus is entirely on winning at all costs by using every ‘trick in the book’ to gain advantage over your opponents. It can be as simple as trying to put your opponents ‘off their game’ by saying things that upset them so they can’t concentrate. Many computer games are constructed in a way that encourages users to game the system. Gamesmanship is also very common in professional sports: from slowing the game down in the final minutes to stop the other team from scoring a winning point, to the use of drugs to enhance performance. Gamesmanship is often expected and encouraged by the commentators.
Many parents actively encourage gamesmanship when playing games with their children in the hope that it will make their children more successful in a cut-throat world.
A gamesmanship approach to games is not educational because the focus is on trying to undermine your opponent, often by using trickery of some kind. When children notice gamesmanship in their opponents they feel unsafe and so the game becomes a battle between people rather than an opportunity to develop skills.
Tips on How to Make Games Educational
Before you start playing a game with your child try to make sure you are playing with a ‘level playing field’. This can be done by using handicaps so all players have a more equal chance of winning. For example in Scrabble, the younger players could be given an extra letter or two.
Make sure the challenge of the game is never too much for the child. This can be done by modifying the rules in the early stages so that the child has the opportunity to learn the basics. In a card game you could start will all people showing their cards and walk through what they would do in the game.
Help your child learn the thinking required to make good decisions in a game by modelling the self-talk when a poor decision has been made.
Set up rituals such as players thanking each other for playing the game. You could also spend time at the end of a game to discuss how to get better at playing the game.
Many children, even very young children, are addicted to gamesmanship so they find it difficult to play board games with other people. They will often cheat, or lose their temper when they lose. The solution is to start playing simple games of chance and insist on good game etiquette. Once sportsmanship has been established insist on it at all times.
Build a Growth Mindset Using Games
I have written before about the importance of helping your child to develop a Growth Mindset. Read more here:
With a Growth Mindset your child will view problems with schoolwork as challenges to overcome.
If your child has a Fixed Mindset, a problem is viewed as something to be avoided because it is out of his/her control. Children who display gamesmanship in social games, and who resist learning sportsmanship, have a Fixed Mindset in social situations so they are resistant to learning from other people. This means they will be reluctant to learn from you, or their teachers, in areas they feel that they have weaknesses or are unsure of themselves.
Playing games to develop sportsmanship is an ideal way to start helping your child develop a Growth Mindset.
So, if your child cheats in games, or is a sore loser and an ungracious winner, then it is important for you to help him/her learn sportsmanship by playing lots of games while insisting on good game etiquette at all times.
Chris Brooks
Principal
High Performance Learning
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