Fierce Education is recognizing those administrators, faculty, instructors, professors, and other higher education influencers who are boldly embracing innovative ways of teaching, technologies and methods to engage and reach students during these challenging times. They are the “Fierce Educators” who are rethinking higher education in this new blended learning world and we will be highlighting their successes and accomplishments.
Fierce Educator:
Dr. Leslie Haas
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Education, Buena Vista University
Being Fierce:
Dr. Leslie Haas, assistant professor of Education at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, IA, has always embraced game-based learning and games in the classroom as part of her instructional toolbox. During this time of COVID-19 and blended learning environments, however, student engagement is even more important and incorporating a variety of teaching modes is needed.
Game-based learning is engaging and lends itself to HyFlex environments, as students can collaboratively create and/or play digital games through video conferencing. As a college instructor, Dr. Haas utilizes games in her classroom as both pre- and post-assessments over many concepts. Students are then able to demonstrate their level of understanding to Dr. Haas in a fun and interactive way.
Dr. Haas has embedded the creation of games into her classroom instruction. Students work in teams to create digital and tactile games to challenge their classmates over a wide variety of concepts. Online games with the focus on education can be embedded into face-to-face, hybrid, and virtual instruction. Games, such as Kahoot, are developed by educators over all content areas and cover a wide variety of concepts.
In addition, board games can also be created and played as students develop boards by creating online templates that both online and offline students can utilize. Game rules, procedures, and objectives can be collaboratively developed, and students can then play the game through video conferencing. For example, each player has their own board as well as game pieces for all players. When Player 1 moves their piece on their board, all players move the piece representing Player 1 on their boards as well. While this is not the traditional way to play tactile games, this practice allows preservice educators to gain confidence in utilizing games in their future hybrid or virtual classrooms.
Dr. Haas embraces technology to enhance and support literacy instruction through game-based learning in a variety of ways. For example, she regularly incorporates the concept of “reading video games” and “playing books” into her teaching practice. She feels that by introducing and incorporating these ideas, her students can experience, as well as learn how to provide a plethora of multiple literacy opportunities. This can be seen when “reading video games” through in-game dialog, questing systems, chat options, and instant messaging. Students can also “play books” by interacting with multimodal texts across genres and modes of communication. Additionally, her use of multimodal text sets to support game-based learning can be seen in her course development and her latest publications.
Action research conducted by Dr. Haas has shown that her students are more motivated and engaged when game-based learning is incorporated to teach difficult to understand concepts. Furthermore, it has shown that regular use of game-based learning supports attendance, participation, and overall understanding which is evidenced through student outcomes. Dr. Haas has also witnessed that learning through games creates a classroom culture where students cultivate a growth mindset through game play. She believes this comes from the fact that during gameplay, people sometimes lose. However, when they lose, it is not stigmatized. Rather, loss is seen as an opportunity to grow and get better.
For more Fierce Educators, see:
Fierce Educator: Dr. Joanna Bauer, Claremont Lincoln University
Fierce Educator: Dr. Scott McNabb, Emory University
Fierce Educator: Dr. Palma Catravas, Montgomery College