Yes, Games Based Learning Does Work – and here’s a Real Life Case Study

Games for learning have always had a bit of controversy around them – are they really useful, do they help increase retention of information, can they motivate an uninterested learner, or are they used just to ‘jazz’ up the learning.

There are convincing arguments made by industry experts to prove both sides of the debate. We, as an organization are fairly bullish on game based learning – we firmly believe that if used for the right reasons, and if designed right, games can lead to break-through results, sometimes not possible by conventional learning methodologies.

Here is a real life case study from within our organization itself, where a game designed by one of our Instructional Designer lead to amazing results.

Background – One of our colleagues has a 4+ year old son. He had recently started going to school. While everything else was fine, he was showing disinterest in writing anything, and no amount of efforts by teachers could make this child write his A, B,C’s or anything else on notebook.

Solution – This colleague of ours generally mentioned about this problem of his son to some of us. We took this up as a challenge, and thought about solving this using game based learning. Our ID’s designed a very simple game –

• They picked up images of buildings, animals, objects which resembled alphabets. Here are some examples –

• Next, they asked our colleague to introduce this activity as a game – where the son would be competing with his mother. Objective of the game was to identify the alphabet which this picture represented, and write it down without showing it to anybody. In the end, results were to be tallied, and winner of the game would get a prize.

• This game was to be repeated with different set of images as and when couple had the time & the energy!

Result – This game was a super hit with the kid. He immediately got interested in the game, and enthusiastically started writing down the alphabets related to the images which were randomly appearing on the computer screen. So much so, that when the game stopped he wanted it to keep going! The phobia of writing is now gone, and the problem has been effectively solved with very little investment.

While this was done for a small child, we have over last few years developed many games for corporate domain. We don’t have empirical data of our own to prove increase in effectiveness of learning (though some very insightful researches exist which point out to positive impact of game based learning – refer to my last post for one such research), but we have seen increase in uptake of the game based learning activity vis-a-vis normal activity, which in itself generates better ROI.

Please do feel free to get in touch with us at in**@gc**********.net if you would like to understand more about various games that we have developed for our corporate learners, and what were the key elements that went in building them which resulted in better uptake of these activities.