Educational Technology: Educational Games and Simulations

In a lecture delivered by professor Muhammad Abdullahi from BUK in 2010, summarises the followings:

Games and simulations are media of instructions designed to provide active participation of students in learning. They are very interactive, avoiding the monotony associated with the normal classroom work and they encourage play which is a natural component of children's learning. 

They are described as minute social systems because of this reason they can be regarded as important part of the socialisation of small children. 

They provide opportunities for students to analyse problems, make decisions, manage real life situations, control projects and experience the consequences of their actions. 

Educational games and simulations are actually designed to help students to learn to achieve specific objectives actively rather than passively. 

                     Educational Games

An educational game is an actively organises with set rules for play. Normally two or more students take part in the play to achieve clearly and specifically designed educational objectives. 

An educational game can therefore, be defined as any contest played according to set rules and decided by skill, strength or apparent lack. 

Games are effective teaching medium both cognitively and affectively. They are concrete operations through which students can experience new concepts before they can recognise them formally. 

There may be no competition in some games but in most of them there is competition may be an individual student against another, a group of students against another group or an individual student against a group of students. 

Good examples of games are the word game scrabble and monopoly. The scrabble can be employed to teach students spelling of new words and vocabulary learning. The monopoly can be used in making students to practice the operation of business groups and organisations. 

                  Educational Simulations 

A simulation is a model of a real life situation, in which students are assigned specific roles. In this type of play students make decisions by themselves in trying to solve problems according to specific conditions. 

As with educational games, simulations also have specific objectives designed to be achieved by the students. 

A simulation can be designed as "the all inclusive term which contains those activities which produce artificial environment or which provide artificial experience for the participants in the activity". 

Simulation can also be defined simply as "an abstraction or simplification of some real life situation or process". Simulations are loosely structured activities because there are no set rules and there is no winner. 

The students are normally the participants, teachers do not participate in the interaction and should have no say in the decision making. 

The responsibilities of the teacher in a simulation exercise include:

a. Making advance preparations.

b. Controlling the smooth running of the play.

c. Deciding when the simulation will start and end.

d. Assigning key roles to individuals students and 

e. If required how documents should be sent from one group to another. 

In simulation the students can participate with assigned roles as community leaders, senior army officers,  political leaders, businessmen, traders, messages, reconciliators, etc. 

Like other instructional media, simulations can be used in many ways to improve teaching. They can be used at the beginning of a unit for introducing the main concepts or for summarising a course that has just been concluded. 

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