Since Bunker and Thorpe (1982. A model for the teaching of games in secondary schools. "Bulletin of Physical Education," 18(1), 5-8.) introduced Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), there has been a growing recognition of advocating approaches to pedagogy that addresses participant learning with games-based approaches (GBA)…

Introduction: Psycholinguistics presents a challenge to teaching and learning because of the many abstract models in the field. Language-related games provide a vehicle for students to ground and demonstrate their understanding of these models. Statement of the problem: Models in psycholinguistics are challenging to teach and learn because they…

To advance games as a teaching strategy, leadership educators may benefit from a common understanding of associated terms. However, achieving this purpose is complicated by no agreed upon definition of game and scholarly debate around terms such as gamification. This article explores gaming terms and proposes a framework intended to provide a…

Why should leadership educators trouble themselves in creating or implementing games for leadership learning? This chapter justifies the use of games as a teaching strategy in leadership education by exploring three rationales. First, games can be meaningfully tied to specific learning theories. Second, games provide motivation for learning, and…

Educational games help reinforce educational concepts. They help students learn through hypothesizing, probing, and reflecting upon the game environment. Understanding the impact of a game is important before deploying it in a class. Recent studies in learning analysis describe methodologies and approaches for analyzing educational games. However,…

Active learning pedagogy has many documented benefits, and while several positive examples of its recent use in STEM classes have led to better performance, greater diversity, more equity, and improved retention of underrepresented student populations, more research in IS and IT classrooms is needed. Most active learning exercises are in a…

Board games are enjoying increased popularity with thousands of new games introduced annually. The most popular mechanical element of board games is rolling dice and economic topics rank in the top three most common board game themes. The dice game Left, Center, Right employs dice and is easy to learn. This essay presents a variety of social…

Physically Active Learning (PAL) is an approach that seamlessly integrates movement with learning. Research has demonstrated that PAL can: (1) improve classroom behavior and activity engagement; (2) significantly reduce sedentary periods of time; and (3) offer aggregated improvement in academic performance over time. This article describes…

Playing satisfies basic human needs such as deepening social relationships (Melton et al., 2019) and experiencing an ideal self's characteristics (Przybylski et al., 2012). In addition, games foster student engagement through the use of intrinsic motivation, critical thinking skills, and the use of creative problem solving (Boghian et al., 2019;…

This article discusses the implementation of interactive literacy approaches that maximize learning for students. Instructional implications are shared along with prospective benefits offered to students when practices are applied. It also provides educators with feasible, generative actions to adapt or incorporate as appropriate to their learning…

Purpose: Serious games and gamification are evidence-based forms of game-based learning that facilitate student/client instruction. Serious games are activities that directly incorporate educational content into games; gamification integrates characteristics of games into nongame activities. They both promote learning by increasing students'…

Animals depend on their surroundings for their survival. In consuming their food, animals are consuming energy. This cycling of matter and the accompanying flow of energy within an ecosystem occurs because of interactions among and between organisms. To guide students in modeling how ecosystems function, the authors share "Ecosystem…

Despite tremendous interest in social games and game studies, the potential of game heuristics for the field of mixed methods remains unknown. This article introduces game heuristics to mixed methods research, showing how it was used in a specific study on the survival probabilities on the "Titanic." Specifically, we describe how game…

The potential of games to support language learning and acquisition -- be it in the digital wilds or in the foreign language classroom -- has often been discussed. In this article, I will look at digital games from an explicitly plurilingual perspective. I describe five existing games that demonstrate a plurilingual outlook (Romanica, MElang-E,…

This article identifies and describes several different approaches to using game-mediated language learning (GML2), drawing in particular on Reinhardt and Sykes' (2012; 2014) framework and related literature. The article concludes with a brief discussion of potential applications to adult literacy and basic education settings and learners.