Gaming in Education: Using Games as a Support Tool to Teach History

Abstract

The use of current and emerging tools in education is becoming a blistering topic among educators and educational institutions. Gaming in education may be viewed as an interference to learning but its role in education is to increase students’ motivation and engagement, to enhance visual skills, to improve students’ interaction and collaboration abilities with their peers and to enable them to apply gaming values in a real-world situation. Educational technology is being used to simplify and improve learning but using technology in education does not directly impact student achievement as the technology tools have to be in line with the curriculum for them to be effective. This paper discusses the implementation and use of gaming applications in teaching History, a subject which is mainly concerned about facts, by highlighting the role games have in education. The design of games such as word search, crossword, jigsaw puzzle, brain teasers and sliding puzzle using an open source tool called ProProfs is also discussed in this paper.

Keywords: Achievement, Educational technology, Gaming, Simulations