Last week, the Irish Symposium on Game-Based Learning (iGBL) was held at Waterford Institute of Technology. It featured over 16 presentations on Game-Based learning with a fantastic keynote presentation by Michael Hallissy of the Digital Hub. There was so much energy and commitment to change in our education system in evidence at a later round table discussion, it was totally inspiring.

Game based learning makes sense to me, I see it at home on a daily basis where amazing collaborative and highly creative learning is taking place and all through the medium of XBox live.   I see machnimas (animations) being made, stories being scripted and sets being built and all in a dymanic, virtual world setting were users can generate their own content. This is such a rich, constantly changing, multimedia environment which begs the question how can our 20th century classrooms compete?  The good news is that they don’t have to, as educators and parents we can embrace game based learning principles and use them to motivate and engage children in their own learning.