Game vs Play

Hello again everyone! Today we are going to talk about something that stroke my attention yesterday when we commented it in our TICs class. Apparently, game and play are different activities, which I had never thought about, and one is more fun than the other, can you guess which one?

Whereas Game Based Learning intends to achieve some didactic goals through fun and interactive activities, the goal of Play is fun itself, regardless of the subject curriculum. I am drawn to believe that both are necessary in the classroom, but I reckon Play can get out of hand quite easily. However, if under all interactive activity lies a didactic purpose, students will start to believe that they are under the illusion of free choice, when in reality they have no liberty to enjoy themselves outside of the teacher's gaze. By the way, the role of the teacher varies greatly among them. As in recess, children don't need any outside guidance when playing hide and seek, and if one doesn't know the rules, the rest explain them or the kid just plays intuitively until they get it. Nevertheless, adding the figure of a rule provider does take away that intuitive factor that is usually one of the most fun parts, and the process of Game becomes more artificial, yet, if done correctly and not overinterrupting the activity, it becomes the perfect balance of learning and enjoying themselves.

I honestly believe this is one of the best methods for teaching virtually anything, but also one of the most demanding. I usually teach through this to small children but with my older ones I tend to leave it behind. From a constructive critical point of view, I think we as teachers should do our most to include GBL in our lesson plans, since we were thankful for our former teachers when they did. From now on, I will try my best to introduce games in the curriculum, but at the moment I can only apply it in one-to-one classes, which aren't very GBL friendly.

Overall, I am glad we got to take a look at this dichotomy because it has helped me realize how many mistakes I made when trying to overexplain or overengage my students, since the only thing I achieved was slowing down the class rhythm and hinder their motivation. As always, thank you for reading and see you soon!