Playing with Reality: Gamifying Education in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Presenter: Alexandra Humphreys
As schools closed and home-schooling began, suddenly there were half a billion students out of school because of Covid. Remote learning looked very different depending on your location, school, teachers, access to internet and home life. When writing ‘Playing With Reality: Gaming In a Pandemic’, I spoke to educators in the UK, US and Australia about how they used virtual worlds for education over the pandemic. In this talk, I share those different experiences – from primary schools to universities and teachers of neurodivergent children – highlighting some who learnt to teach in virtual worlds for the first time, those who had already benefited from teaching within games, and the children who took the lead in gamifying learning. Some believe we weren’t prepared for such a big shift to digital – I’ll explore these views and ask whether the pandemic has changed the way we use virtual learning, or were game worlds merely a means to an end until lockdowns ended?
