Interactive games help students learn at their own pace
Remember board games? Do you remember why we were encouraged to have fun in this way? Were you a Trivial Pursuits champion who always filled your playing piece first? Were you a super sleuth when playing Cluedo? Playing games is entertaining and engaging, so it makes sense that educa- tion professionals working in this innovative technological age should find ways to engage their students through gaming and encourage student learning.
At Jumeira Baccalaureate School (JBS) never has a student asked: “Why are we playing games?” Instead, students nearly always ask: “Can we play this again soon, Miss?”
There are so many free educational gaming resources available for teachers to use. A firm favourite with students in the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) Middle Years Programme and Diploma Programme, English Language and Literature and Language Acquisition in English, French and Arabic, is a free online quiz game. For those who have not discovered this resource, the quiz game platform claims to be the world’s largest student and teacher online learning community, with 30 million active users every month in 130 different countries around the world. This was very appealing to our JBS teachers and students, as international-mindedness is central to our IB philosophy.
As teachers, we assign specific quizzes to our students via our online class within the platform. We can create a unique quiz set to differentiate specifically for our students, or we can utilise one of the 200 million study sets already available. As teachers of both language and concepts, I can see that the platform allows students to work independently to learn and embed the content at their own pace. Our students are encouraged to be ‘risk-takers’ in their learning, as they practice the content through different online activities — flashcards, writing, spelling in which they hear the question but do not see it. They can test their own knowledge when they feel ready, review their score themselves or with us, the teachers, to identify any area in which they need further practice. This level of autonomy in their learning focuses their attention on important study skills that can be used outside of their languages lessons in other subjects. They can even make their own quiz set or practise their skills using a pre-made quiz of their own choice.
The atmosphere becomes energised once the students reach the gravity and live rounds. These formats encourage students to compete using their skills and knowledge when they feel ready. They engage in asteroid battles against everyone in their classroom and beyond! The teacher can check each student’s scores and ascertain if there are gaps in the knowledge of the class as well as the individual student. For these fantastic features and many more, at JBS we regularly hear “Miss, are we playing today?”
This level of autonomy in their learning focuses their attention on important study skills that can be used outside of their languages lessons in other subjects.”