EDUCATIONAL GAMES AS A FORM OF PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING

Today students tend to learn the information, training mostly their memory. But memorizing does not mean knowing. And knowing does not mean being able to do. It is impossible to foster an ability without practicing it in an activity, a game or a case study.

A lecture provides knowledge, whereas being an “active participant” not only fosters the development of creative skills, but also brings them to action.

Stirring up students’ creative, cognitive activity insists on Problem-Based Learning, which is known as the most efficient tool for fostering solid, deep knowledge, skills and attitudes.

PBL triggers students’ self-discovery of scientific phenomena, operation modes, etc. PBL resides in planning and organization of problem situations for students, their perception and formulation, solving the identified problems within the active communication between students and faculty.

The best way to reproduce and study problems within the educational process is to deliver them in a form of a game that involves group training on decision taking in real-like conditions.

Educational game joins two specific educational principles: the principle of future professional activity simulation and the principle of problem orientation. It is also important that a game has probabilistic nature.

The requirements towards educational tasks are simple and attainable: the issue should be topical; its solution should require students to have basic knowledge, imagination and creative skills. The task itself should be quite difficult, however accessible for solution; it should foster trigger search for new principles, facts, solution methods.

The aim of gamification is triune: fostering knowledge, skills and attitudes required for future professional activity; self-evaluation of own performance in a game activity; and winning in competition between groups of students.

Key objectives for gamification of study process are:
• Fostering critical thinking and analysis, creative thinking;
• Fostering professional communication skills;
• Fostering responsibility for taken decisions;
• Mastering basic schemes for managerial decisions taking in the context of problem situations;
• Fostering team-work skills.

An educational game can be structured both for the purpose of fostering and for the purpose of accessing competences required for a particular professional activity, i.e. it can be both a teaching methods and an assessment tool.

The Department of Higher Mathematics of the National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University has a vast expertise on development and application of study games on the “Mathematics” course for various engineering specialties. For the past five years the Department has been conducting a research, aiming at determination of the influence of educational games’ application on mastering a course.

Students of a course were split into two groups: students of the “conventional” program and students of the advanced gamified program. They underwent an entry-test at the beginning of the course and an exit-test at the end of the course.

Students are also actively involved in the games’ development process. At the beginning of the term students are divided into groups and create educational games; testing and assessment of the games is carried out by the students from other groups.

The results of the research indicate that the implementation of educational games is efficient. It is supported by deeper knowledge of a discipline and students’ higher motivation.