“Intersperse gaming activities throughout your curriculum,” Broderick says. “That may be as simple as a ten-second question and see who answers it the quickest. It’s got to tie into the curriculum no matter what content they’re using. It has to be tied into a way that’s going to engage the student into the lessons.”
Broderick says if a college is looking to implement gaming solutions in its classrooms, educators should consider a more collaborative teaching style. That way, each student will stay involved with the lesson and is exposed to minimal distractions.
“Too often I’ve seen gaming in classes where they’ve picked a couple of students to come up and compete against each other, and while that’s entertaining, it’s different than remembering information and competing with [it],”he says. “The dynamics in participating and connectivity have got to be there. You want to make sure you find a way where everybody participates and that everybody feels connected in the activity.”
How to take gaming to another level
Aside from clickers, gaming technologies are making a scene outside of the classroom.
For example, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) recently installed a three-story media wall (by Zenith Systems), located in the university’s Tinkham Veale University Center.
The media wall is made of three separate and stacked microtiles, which make the wall 16 feet high by five feet wide.
The bottom microtile displays the goings-on on campus, from events, activities, profiles of professors, faculty, alumni, and other news, while the top two microtiles contain an interactive gaming feature.
The gaming feature offers six different games centered around major Cleveland landmarks, including the Cleveland Skyline.
“There was as nothing like this before,” says Stephen Campbell, Vice President of Campus Planning and Facilities Management at CWRU. “The prior student center was in a much older building dating from the turn of the 20th century, so there was nothing of that nature in that building.”
Campbell says installing the media wall was a smart move for the university; he says the wall keeps current students engaged, attracts prospective students, and draws in members from the neighboring community.
“I think it’s been used in a fun way to engage the students to interact with the wall through those video games,” he says. “It also begins to orient them to University Circle and Cleveland in general.”
Campbell also says the ROI from the media wall will pay off. He says the wall’s infrastructure can be reused and can run on newly evolved software he anticipates will be developed in the future.
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