why do teachers tell us to play video games

And as a teacher, I feel empowered to use them for learning.”īut integrating games into lessons regularly is difficult, because no school has 25 PlayStation 4 or Nintendo Switch consoles at the ready.

As a player, I love video games for the escapism and imagination they offer. “Without trust and relationships between children, parents and teachers, you can’t achieve long-term attention and application. “They are incredibly enthusiastic about it and I love the relationship and rapport it helps build with the children – that’s the bedrock of education,” McGivern says. And many teachers in their 30s are likely to have grown up with video games. Incorporating children’s interests helps them learn, he says. The teacher, Chris McGivern, is a lifelong fan of video games and sees plenty of good reasons to bring them into the classroom wherever possible. Tempting … remote-controlled cars that carry biscuits. They are fun to play with, but they also teach engineering principles – the software includes a child-friendly but comprehensive breakdown of how the console uses features such as vibration, infrared cameras and gyroscopes to make the models work. A cardboard fishing rod can be used to play a fishing game, attached by string to a base housing the console. A cardboard piano becomes a working keyboard with a screen. Snap two controllers on to a cardboard car and it judders across the table. The kids are playing with Nintendo Labo, an ingenious game that comes with a box of fold-up cardboard models that turn from inert facsimiles into working toys, with the addition of a Nintendo Switch console. At the end of the summer term at Southgate primary school in Crawley, West Sussex, a class of 10-year-olds are folding together cardboard models of remote-controlled cars and decorating them with pipe cleaners, pens, googly eyes and tape, with the aim of using them to transport a biscuit across a table and into the open mouths of their teachers.

Why do teachers tell us to play video games