What Is Digital Games-Based Learning?

What is the first notion coming up in your mind when you heard of digital games? Just for fun? However, digital games can be used in teaching and learning. Students usually complain that the way of teacher’s tutoring is boring. Therefore, lots of students in this day and age, seldom pay attention to the lesson, which result in bad academic results. Teachers have been exploring a variety of ways to make their lessons more interesting, in order to enhance students’ learning efficiency. Testing by some of the professionals, they find that digital games-based learning actually is one of the best ways to achieve the goal. It is because many teenagers will play different kinds of digital when they are growing up, they will be more interested to learn
There are numerous natures of video games, such as action games, sports games, problem solving games and still a lot to mention. Although the methods or skills needed for accomplishing a particular game will not be totally the same, they all required players to pay high attention, a vital element for winning the game, to it. In other words, digital games are training students to allocate attention to a situation. According to Granic (2014), shooting video games is one of the best examples. Shooting video games usually initiate participants to be a soldier and they are asked to kill enemy with guns. The enemy will not appear at a specific time and location. People who love playing shooting video games tends to have faster and more accurate attention allocation compared to those who do not (Granic, 2014, p.3). Chess game will be another good example. Playing these kinds of problem solving games will demand for high concentration to the game, which means people playing these kinds of game would be more likely to keep concentration at a high level on a certain thing. As digital games can train players to allocate attention, students who play digital games like chess or shooting games would enhance their corresponding skills. Thus, they can pay faster and more attention on the
According to the uses and gratifications theory done by Ruggiero, gaming, one of the means of diverse medias that control students’ emotion state, is believed as the most efficient and effective ways for students to create positive feeling. There are also a proved causal relation between playing digital games and having positive mood, for instance, Russoniello had suggested that playing games with the minimal interfaces, short commitments and high accessibility, like Angry Birds and Bejewled II, student can feel less stress and more relax, most importantly, students can therefore having a more positive mood. Researches also point out another benefit of playing video game towards one’s emotion. Student can evoke the most intense positive emotional experience through the context of video games. Gamers will feel proud after successfully fight against adversity, they can also have a high sense of control with lower self-consciousness after playing games with intrinsically rewards. The above experiences will probably have positive influences for students to perform in school or even in the workplace environment, like having commitment for achieving certain level in school, having a higher self-esteem and feeling less anxious and more