How can game-based learning support your students? How can you include gamification in your lesson planning, and how do you use it to engage all your students and their diverse needs? In the second edition of Learning Supercharged: Digital Age Strategies and Insights from the EdTech Frontier, author Caroline D. Haebig offers up answers to these questions and much more. The book explores the intersections of education research, cognitive science, emerging edtech, and the realities of schools today to offer up practical suggestions and solutions to great teaching practices. In this exclusive excerpt, Haebig explores how scaffolding game-based learning activities can ensure access and engaging learning for all.
Leveraging Adaptive Scaffolding to Support Inclusive Game-Based Learning
Think about the learner variability that exists within your student population. As educators, our responsibility is to design learning environments and experiences that are inclusive and can help students to be successful. Scaffolding—whether provided by teacher, peers, technology, or a combination of all these—is just as important for helping students develop knowledge and skills within a game-based environment as it is in any other type of learning environment.
In a digital game-based learning environment, scaffolding can take many forms (questions, prompts, modeling, visuals, and more) and serve a variety of purposes. Scaffolding can be integrated to facilitate students’ cognitive, metacognitive, and competition within gameplay. Research shows that scaffolding plays a key role in directing player’s attention to important information that is often overlooked during gameplay, helping them to organize and integrate knowledge that is necessary for making connections between game content and content knowledge (Chen et al., 2023). As with many other types of learning experiences and design, educators must make an intentional effort to help students stay focused on the larger learning intentions and goals, and scaffolding built within a game-based learning environment can help to do this.
Adaptive scaffolds are unique in the sense that they are specific to students’ dynamic and varying needs. Common scaffolds based on core-game design elements include providing learners and game participants with clues, additional content, feedback, guiding, prompts, or structures they need to be successful. Think about game shows that allow a player to “phone a friend” for help with a tough question: The player considers who they know who is most likely to have the answer and gets to choose the source they go to for the best insight to solve the question. Educators can build similar elements and more into the mechanics of game-based learning experiences to scaffold the student learning process. Game mechanics are the fundamental rules, actions, and interactions that govern how a game works and how players interact with it.
Table 5.2 illustrates how scaffolding techniques can be used to support different game mechanics and create active learning exercises. It is also important to consider what scaffolds are built into pre-created digital games and game-based curriculum resources and to identify ways to create student awareness around the use of those supports and features.
Learning Supercharged
A comprehensive guide to navigating the evolving digital landscape, as well as addressing the advancements and challenges we encounter in today’s educational settings and society.
