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Games-to-Teach or Games-to-Learn: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters

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Games-To-Teach or Games-To-Learn

Part of the book series: Gaming Media and Social Effects ((GMSE))

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Abstract

In this chapter, I articulate the distinction between what I refer to as “games-to-teach ” and “games-to-learn .” I critically interrogate why games-to-teach are deeply problematic if the goal is to educate rather than school children. I do so from the perspectives of knowing , being , doing , and valuing ; i.e., from epistemological , ontological , praxiological , and axiological frames of reference. I then elaborate on the vital differences between the two perspectives from the standpoint of making a commitment to schooling children or to educating them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Chap. 5 for details.

  2. 2.

    There is nothing wrong, of course, in wanting students to be able to generate the correct answer to mathematical problems. The issue here is that for a deep understanding of the problem space to be achieved, students need to grasp the solution space in relation to the error space. This point is elaborated later.

  3. 3.

    Whether they know “correctly” or otherwise—that is, whether they genuinely understand—is a separate matter.

  4. 4.

    A person who is asked to show you his or her knowledge (as a material object) will be hard pressed to do so. Laypeople may be apt to point to their heads, but when pressed further to be more specific, they are likely to show signs of exasperation.

  5. 5.

    The implications of adopting a process-relational worldview are vast and beyond the scope of this chapter.

  6. 6.

    Machines, such as computers, whose “intelligence” is at best artificial can only mimic human cognition in a syntactically driven and semantics-free manner. Thus, inputting “3 × 5” on an electronic calculator will yield the display “15”. But the calculator’s output is constituted by the numerals “1” followed by “5”. This output is very different from how a human usually reads the output: as the number 15. A number is a semantically laden notion in the field of arithmetic, but a numeral is (only) a representation of a number. Indeed, multiple numeral systems exist, for example, the Arabic numeral system and the Roman numeral system. Consequently, numerals are arbitrary representations of number. There is no single one-to-one mapping between numeral and number. In this sense, numerals are said to be meaningless.

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  1. Learning Sciences and Technologies, National Institute of Education, Singapore, Singapore

    Yam San Chee

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  1. Yam San Chee
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Chee, Y.S. (2016). Games-to-Teach or Games-to-Learn: What’s the Difference and Why It Matters. In: Games-To-Teach or Games-To-Learn. Gaming Media and Social Effects. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-518-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-518-1_2

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