Abstract:

The research on the pedagogy of the game has emphasized the educational value of the games. Something is learnt in every kind of game, but it is necessary that the game addresses some challenges, several objectives and relevant contents so that it really has teaching objectives.
The teaching component has to be clearly defined, it is essential to have a planning-reflection about the objectives, contents and learning strategies adapted to developmental phases of the child.
Games have a significant influence in the development of memory, attention processes, verbal and numerical fluency, reasoning and creative skills. Academic games can be used as a tool at different stages within the learning process: at the beginning of the lesson as a motivation element, during the lesson as other complement, or just at the end as revision or remedial teaching.
That is why the proposal we will describe below does not have the creation of games as a priority, but the psychodidactic reflection about it and other involved aspects in the efficiency of the recreational activities that have been created.
This learning experience is based on games and on the online creation of recreational activities from the study of one song and it has been developed through the last 6 years in Educational Psychology course that is taught in the first year of Teaching Degree specialised in Foreign language (in our case, English). The students’ average age is 19 years old and the average student per class is 60. The course is taught in Basque and its contents are about the psychological models and their educational applications. The project represents one third of the final mark and it is compulsory to pass the course.
Therefore, the project highlights to students that the aim is not only to create a technological product more or less sophisticated, but to understand and use some of the educational contributions made by different psychological models such as the behaviourism, the information processing, social learning, the constructivism or the psychoinstructional theories.
In short, students face a structured activity with this project, an activity guided by the teacher and carried out with other colleagues’ collaboration. In this way, it is focused on a specific content of the school curriculum and the learning objectives in a clear manner. Finally, it takes the advantage of the potentials of computing for the designs of activities taking into account the previous knowledge students have.