Communicating knowledge to children and teens
Kids and teens use a lot of hours in school in order to acquire knowledge. That’s why it’s essential that the time they spend in school is used sensibly, so they also actually acquire the knowledge. It is however not enough to simply make the information accessible. It’s more about making sure that the information is relevant to them, so they want to learn.
How to best teach kids and teens?
Any student group consist of different types of learners. Some need to see and hear about the subject they’re being taught, while others prefer learning through experiences, where you’re doing stuff to understand a concept. This makes it incredibly difficult to know exactly which type of teaching is best.
One way to navigate this is by having a varied approach to teaching. Variation is what is making the entire class and process of learning make sense to the students. Having variation when teaching ensures that there’ll be different styles of learning in play, which speaks to a lot of different types of students at once.
That’s why you as a teacher must manage to meet the students at their level and choose different teaching formats when planning the curriculum. For example, planning to use a learning game, which ensures a different type of stimulation for the kids.
What makes great teaching for kids and teens?
Great teaching for kids and teens is also about creating engagement and motivation, which learning games are amazing at creating among students.
When you take a closer look at what makes games so engaging and motivating, then it’s typically four elements that are behind it. The four elements are contests, the narrative, the social aspect and the tactile input.
Contents make it fun to participate in the game. It makes it feel like there’s something to lose. Even if there in actuality isn’t. This aspect gives the students some organic engagement for participating and learning.
The narrative ensures there’s an authentic purpose for learning. The students want to participate because they have to achieve something specific within the game. If they don’t engage with the game then they’ll miss out on the end of the story, or not achieve the results they organically hoped for.
The social aspect of games also creates motivation because it’s fun to interact with your classmates and learn from and with them.
Last but not least there’s the tactile input, where you use your entire body and touch things with your own hands. This aspect ensures changeability in the classroom and activates different parts of the brain which helps them retain the knowledge.
Communicate knowledge to students successfully through these learning games
At Copenhagen Game Lab we’ve developed some learning games aimed at children and young adults. You can see a few examples of some of these learning games below:
Projektum is a board game about innovation from a children’s perspective. The entire purpose of the game is to enhance children’s innovation and project development skills while showing them that they are more than capable of taking the first step in the process.
In Projektum the kids are playing three students from a local school that has an idea for a project that they plan to make into reality. Here they need to work together to make decisions about how they want to make the project a reality.
The learning game is built upon the DIN model that has a focus on giving better and more innovative processes and results that actually have the potential to be implemented.
Data security is an important but dense subject for most people. And as a young adult, it’s probably not top of mind when you’re navigating through the internet. That is why the Danish Data Protection Agency wanted to create a teaching-based game that could be a part of making data security a priority for young adults.
It resulted in the quiz game The Data Battle. Here you’re gradually introduced to more difficult terms within data security, so the teens slowly get a deeper understanding of the core terminology. Like understanding rights, types of personal information and data protection.
Klasserumsspil.dk
Klasserumsspil.dk is a Danish website filled with our semi-digital games aimed at the Danish grade school. Each game includes material for an entire subject, where there are both assignments within the game and in the classroom.
The games are developed for different subjects, which makes them a perfect addition to a project week.
