22 July, 2014

Computer and video games are often thought of in a negative way. They are traditionally associated with addiction and aggressive behaviour, and often portrayed as being potentially damaging to children’s health and personal development.

A recent Irish Symposium on Game-Based-Learning hosted here on campus, however, flipped these ideas and associations on their head and looked at computer and video games as effective tools for teaching and learning. This event brought together educators, researchers and students active or interested in using computer and video games for learning in this exciting new field.

Conference chair Dr. Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin says, “Computer and video games have actually been used to support learning for much longer than is often realised and there is now quite a lot of evidence to argue for their educational effectiveness across a very wide range of areas. Our conference will be great opportunity for educationalists and members of the public alike to hear about ongoing work and research into this exciting area. It’s going to be stimulating and interactive and it’s going to be a lot of fun too.”

Over the course of this one day attendees heard, about developments in learning through virtual reality, how game-based learning is finding its way into schools, the latest research into brain training games, the use of alternative game control devices such as the Wiimote and Microsoft Kinect for learning and the development of educational games that sense emotional as well as physical inputs.

In the three days leading up to the event 15 secondary school students were invited to come to CIT to learn how to build educational computer games, the results of their work were presented in the afternoon of the conference event and were really just amazing and they left with a real sense of the possibilities that exist in the area of video game design.