The Creative Impulse

Didactics

1. 
   The Lazy Teacher?

   Experience driven learning.

   Are serious games about putting teachers into recliners, feet up, eyes closed and enjoying Bach while students are running around in elf-like outfits? Flying planes, or shooting their pixilated peers? Can you imagine a classroom full of students, racing around in cars? And in the end of the day they are not left with a lot of wreckage but with so much data that they are able to design new sensors to measure speed or the wear and tear of asphalt?

   Can you imagine?

   Serious games not only require good visuals and infrastructure inside the game, also didactics are an issue. New places of learning require new didactics. How to operate inside a 3D virtual game is very different from being in a traditional classroom. In retrospect of all my developments with and within serious games, I have seen that there are four different ways of guiding students. And yes, a lazy teacher is one of them. Though he is not as lazy as you might think from that statement.

   This presentation will show  the ABCD of teaching with serious games. Adventure, Background, Competition and Drama. Four ways of guiding students towards new information. Not telling them, but giving them tools to find out for themselves, giving them an experience. Familiarizing the student with the educational purpose. Making it his and connecting to it.

   As children are born, they are taught to play, as soon as they get older they are taught to stop playing and start structural thinking patterns. How can we teach adults to be innovative thinkers if we do not let them explore and play. Simply by becoming a more lazy teacher. Not to step away from the desk, but to let students play again, find out for themselves and be a guide. Either hands-on or facilitating. Be there for them, just don’t step in front of them to block their way...

   All in all… Dare to get busy to be lazy!

   
   

   
   

   Here you can find a review on the presentation I gave at Metameets
   

    

   
   

   
   

   http://thecreativeimpulse.webs.com/documents/The%20Busy%20and%20Lazy%20Teacher%20PDF.pdf
   Download (1 MB)