Part 6: Programming, Project Based Learning and games-ED

Project Based Learning (PBL) is big news in the education world.  I wrote a blog article about the benefits of PBL in March, which you can read here.  I also discussed a new school in the U.S. that used PBL heavily to teach its children, in this article.  It is essentially a way of teaching children things through them completing a project.  They are given a topic or goal and they must complete a project around it.  It is an extremely engaging way of learning that enables children to see the real-world value of the knowledge they gain.

Image courtesy of NMCorg on Flickr.

Teaching children programming lends itself very well to PBL, either at a whole class level, or in smaller groups.  Using the goal of creating a game, children can learn to program along with many other skills (media skills, logic, problem solving, creativity, maths etc.).  The project could also be situated around a subject, which could increase subject matter knowledge in a stealthy way.  For example, a game about history would lead children to learn about that history, for the game to be successful.  The project could also go further and teach children entrepreneurial skills, business skills, marketing skills, social media skills etc. if the game is to be sold and marketed.  Even if it was never to be actually marketed, a hypothetical case could be presented and the children could still learn these skills.

games-ED (which brings you this blog, see tab at top of page for more info) believes that it is important for children to have some understanding of programming.  We also appreciate the myriad of extra skills to be gleaned from teaching children to program and how powerful PBL can be.  The skills that we use to develop games combined with our ability to deliver training enables us to run PBL courses.  We have experience of running 450 workshops and 40 school classes and have previous PBL experience.  For examples, see Climate Crew and Eco Busters.  For more information visit: http://www.games-ed.co.uk/pbl.html.

Please follow @paulladley on Twitter, games-ED on Pinterest and like games-ED’s Facebook and Google+ pages for blog updates and interesting games based learning findings.

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