Serious games – that is games, with an educational purpose – the way forward for PSHE?
As a British Council Schools Ambassador and SSAT Global Learning Lead Practitioner, I have a keen interest in all aspects of global learning. I like to get involved in international links and projects whenever possible. I have recently retired from teaching but I taught French and German across the age ranges for nearly thirty years, and then more recently, I held the post of ‘Head of Citizenship and PSHE’ at Christ the King College, a Secondary School on the Isle of Wight. As such, I wrote the programme of Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) education and created the PSHE resources for the whole college. I was always looking for new ways to make PSHE more relevant and interesting, involving outside agencies and speakers if appropriate. So, when there was the opportunity to get involved in the eConfidence project, I wanted to know more…
About the eConfidence project
“eConfidence – Confidence in behaviour changes through serious games is a 24 months project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. eConfidence focuses on the use of serious games in education and their potential benefits in supporting behavioural changes for young people. The project aims at developing a methodology and testing it with two serious games considering behavioural aspects related to safe use of internet and bullying.”
We were successful in our application to be part of the pilot project. All I needed to do was find a group of thirty-six students from Years 8 and 9 to do the pre- and post-tests, and then randomly select twenty-four out of the thirty-six to play the games. This was a very mixed-ability group: they volunteered; they were not ‘selected’ in any way. We had some very intelligent and some very weak students, and a couple with quite challenging behaviour. We did need to get written consent from all students and parents before we could finalise the group. I also needed to set aside a lunchtime a week for ten weeks and find a suitable ICT suite.
The first benefit of these games that I noticed was that students could work individually and did not need to share their thoughts with anyone else. All students view the topics of online safety and bullying in a different way and it was refreshing for students to be able to participate in activities individually. It was obvious that students were engaged with the games (partly as there was silence in the ICT suite) but I knew that many of this group would not have attended regularly if they were not motivated to do so. Following the pilot tests, students commented that they enjoyed participating and liked the fact that they could progress through the game in their own time. They enjoyed the fact that their learning was meaningful and set in real-life situations. Students were able to identify situations where bullying might take place and learn of strategies to cope; students were able to develop safe digital skills and I also developed my own digital skills. The overall impression of the eConfidence project was that this was a positive experience.
Following the eConfidence project, I was lucky enough to be invited to the seminar ‘Evidence-based development of serious games for the educational sector: challenges and perspectives’ to be held in Brussels on 12 September 2018. This seminar brought together representatives of stakeholders in the field of serious games for educational purposes. All participants had the opportunity to contribute actively presenting their experience, projects and initiatives. During the event, European Schoolnet, eConfidence partners and Scientix experts engaged with the participants around the lessons learnt from their activities concerning games at school.
During the afternoon’s parallel sessions, Panagiotis Rigas from IES Fernando de Rojas and I had the opportunity to present our experience of the pilot project in our schools. We also heard from Anne-Elizabeth Lenel, ORT France and were introduced to Beaconing, with a wealth of games and opportunities for teachers to create gamified learning experiences within and outside the classroom. I was able to bring examples home and am still exploring these.
On their promotional flyer, ‘Beaconing’ asks ‘Ready to change traditional way of learning?’. If PSHE is to be meaningful, current and relevant to the individual learner then there is no doubt that serious games offer huge benefits. The key to success for those producing the games will be: keeping schools involved in the research process; ensuring that the games’ content is adaptable so can be relevant to a variety of learning settings; making sure that there are no restrictions to their use in schools; and looking for ways to keep the costs down.
