Previous Erasmus+ projects: Games for Inclusion and Learning

The Power of Technology

The idea behind this project stems from the belief that technology has the power to empower, support and transform education. Yet, it is not technology per se that truly helps improve learning outcomes. It needs to come from the pioneers that work with young people and their pedagogical approach to learning. Similarly, we know that children love playing games, as this is something they naturally do and naturally learn from. Yet it is not simply playing digital games that leads to enhanced learning outcomes either. Combining the two ideas was what prompted this project:

The GAMES for inclusion and Learning project aimed to develop innovative teaching methods involving making and playing games to support learning and involve all students including those with special education needs.

This project built on existent approaches in the partner countries by extending and exchanging pedagogic knowledge and expertise and developing new learning paths specifically through making games and then playing them. It aimed to:

• Develop teachers’ skills to take innovative approaches in teaching.
• To show the benefits on pupils using digital games as a tool to create artefacts both individually and collaboratively.

Through a series of case studies based in classrooms in the UK and Sweden, GAMES for Inclusion and Learning aimed to develop teachers’ as well as students’ skills. The teachers collaborated and exchanged knowledge and expertise in using games in diverse settings and with pupils of around 10 years of age (upper primary) in a mainstream (Sweden) and a SEN school (UK).

The games used and developed into lesson plans include:

• Scratch
• Kodu
• Minecraft
• Lego

This web-based project report aims to share materials in order to promote and support the use of games in education. (http://www.gamesforlearning.se)

Led by Buckinghamshire County Council, in the UK, the project collaborated with the University College of London Institute of Education and Stony Dean School in Amersham, Buckinghamshire. In Sweden Gothenburg Region Utbildning worked together with the Interactive Institute and Lexby school in Partille, Gothenburg.
The project was supported by the European Commission’s Erasmus + program and ran from September 2015 – August 2017.

Outcome

Teachers  have been experimenting with the use of games for a while and focused on in this project was to investigate the challenges in implementing this use both in mainstream as well as in SEN classrooms and to understand what it takes to convince teachers and middle managers to use it. 

It was important therefore to establish how digital games can be used to allow for this understanding to occur and to enhance some of the learning processes for the target population.

For example, a recent study found that dyslexic children who trained on action video games showed significant improvements on basic measures of both attention and reading ability, suggesting future directions for the study of dyslexia intervention paradigms (Bavelier et al. 2013).

The game creation process involves many underlying processes and allows many skills to be developed and not just coding or programming skills. The main focus is on learning, not on the technology per se, and the pedagogies are based on psychological processes including motivation, communication, collaboration, self-regulation and utilising working memory.

Specific interests of the child are encouraged when considering the context of the game to be made, and some of the following learning and teaching principles are involved:

• Instantaneous feedback
• support for sequencing
• overcoming anxieties
• accepting failure/making mistakes
• producing an artefact
• motivation and self regulation
• confidence and learner autonomy
• feelings of independence
• taking turns to work together
• working at the right pace
• passive as well as active learning
• variety of learning approaches and of tools
• taking risks
• problem solving and
• debugging

and more….

Based on these principles and processes, which were identified in the case studies described by the participating teachers, we aimed specifically to draw some practice-based lessons learned.