- Hi everyone. My name is Ammar Aquil. I'm currently an educator with the Peel District School Board. I was formerly an employee of Microsoft in Education Canada. Today, I'm here to talk to you about a personal passion of mine, which is game-based learning. My masters thesis was on game-based learning video games in the classroom in Ontario to be specific. And that is something I'm super passionate about and and have been lucky enough to get experience with over the last several years. Before we get going, let's talk about what game-based learning is not. You might have heard the word gamification which often gets confused with game-based learning. Gamification is using video game traits or game traits to manage other systems, like classroom management, for example. So, if your students are really good, you give them points. And if they get a certain amount of points, they get a prize or a privilege, like a pizza party. That's gamification. Today, we're here to talk about game-based learning, which is the use of video games to drive forward curricular goals. Some of the popular games you might be familiar with or you might have had the privilege of seeing when you were observing a classroom is something like Prodigy. I don't have too much experience with Prodigy personally, but my understanding is it's a math based game. You play a video game, you go on quests and to solve those quests, you have to solve math problems. It drives forward math learning. My personal favorite, the one I have most experience with is Minecraft, which is like virtual Lego bricks. You build things. So think about what you could build, inside this is a virtual field, right? If you're doing something like social studies, learning about settlers, you can create a settler village. If you've ever done anything like pixel art, you can do that in Minecraft, in 3D. It's pretty cool. It has a built in coding system. It's the use of that video game to drive forward curricular goals. It could be something like . If you're familiar with that. Playing that to create narrative prompts. So have students play the video game then go right about either what they saw or maybe continuing the story in their own way. In older grades in high school they use games like Civilization which is what's the best way to describe Civilization. It's a simulation of a civilization. You create society all the way from the stone age and you drive it forward into the nuclear age and beyond that even. And how does that help you learn about politics? How does that help you learn about history? All of those connections are made while you're playing those video games.