Abstract:

The fundamental purpose of education is to guarantee that all students benefit from the learning experience to the full, by ensuring their participation in public, community and economic life. To achieve this, educators need new methodologies which would help them reach these goals using the most effective tools possible. A myriad of methods have been used so far and the idea of fun learning through the use of games is permeating through the educational system as being an effective way of educating the students. In the following study, we will peep into the future of education by seeing what educators and their students think about it. We will see if they’re ready to put aside more traditional methods whilst resorting to games as effective teaching tools.

Our study showed that both students and educators tend to believe that serious games and simulations are beneficial and are definitely a better learning tool than traditional methods. But as argued in our research, it still is not viable to implement these games in the classrooms. For serious games and simulations to be introduced into schools, governments must help educational institutes financially so that they can afford them. Also, the industry must develop more of these games and make them easily available. An alternative to these can be gamifying the teaching approach. This approach is much cheaper but then one would lose a lot in terms of exciting teaching material (such as simulators, etc). However, one will still get the students attention and make the lessons more interactive than with the traditional approach. After all, both these methods have their disadvantages and are still being tested in various schools. However, as technology becomes available, we would expect to see more proliferation of these techniques.