Bringing Games and Simulations into Teacher Education

摘要

Games and simulations are serious new tools for learning. They can achieve dramatically higher levels of emotional power, interactivity and effectiveness for learning, compared to traditional resources such as books, lectures, videos, and student-produced artifacts such as reflection papers, student research, and tests and quizzes. Among their key advantages are seamless integration with online resources, embedding of complex models to be discovered and acquired via mastery, and high-resolution time-based data for analysis of learning. As a result, games and simulations can effectively engage students in direct experience with the causal mechanisms and structures of systems, and through experiment and discovery, assist people in acquiring higher order knowledge and skills. Airline pilots, for example, train in simulators and return to them to renew and further develop their experience base. Themili-tary extensively uses digital games to provide scalable, uniformly high quality training exercises. Medical schools are rapidly developing simulations for a wide variety of educational purposes. Therefore, the time is right for schools of education to get serious about games and simulations in teacher education.