Publish at August 21 2017 Updated October 16 2024
Games have a long history in schools. We remember our playground games, hopscotches, perched cats or boisterous ball games, or the board games the teacher allowed us to play on the last days of school.
Perhaps playing is a viscerally human need, and some people imagine ways of integrating it into teaching. Ever since researchers realized that the pleasure of learning was a driving force, notably through the functioning of the hormones involved in learning, edutainment has found its letters of nobility.
Do you remember Gary Gygax and his famous Dungeons & Dragons invented in the 70s? It was he who set the tone for a generation that is now letting games into the workplace. A game master would invent a story, and players would adopt the behaviors of their characters to answer the call of adventure. Since then, role-playing has taken on many forms, including online.
Élise de Wolf, aka Lady Mendy, is said to have introduced the practice of murder parties to France in the 1930s. Murder parties smell of tea and muffins in Agatha Christie novels, and ABC Crime has taken this idea and turned it into an opportunity for company employees to solve criminal investigations. This type of game is said to help build team spirit and energize events. The aim is to identify the clues that will lead to finding the murderer of a staged assassination.
What has delighted young people has also delighted adults, who have adapted many of the games and theatrical practices to their needs. The psychoanalytical version of role-playing is called sociodrama, which wiktionary defines as "A psychotherapeutic method in which a group chooses and stages a situation that is common to its members. The practice of theater, conceived for entertainment purposes, can be found, for therapeutic purposes, in psychodrama and sociodrama.
In training, the method was developed by Jacob Lévy Moreno. It is sometimes simplified into a role-playing game or, on the contrary, exacerbated by the participation of professional role-players, chameleons capable of taking on any situation through improvisation, as promised by the company"La porte s'ouvre".
Indoor games come in many flavors, from dice games and lottery games to board games, which are well known for teaching marketing, accounting and business management. For example, the game discrimine invented by the CNFPT aims to combat discrimination.
Card games for learning about autism , for example. The frame games invented by Thiagi are games to invent and build yourself. There are many sources of inspiration, including :
Last but not least, bingo games create an ever-renewed sense of excitement and pleasure for those who can shout bingo when the squares on their card are filled with corn kernels or tokens.
In escape games, game masters lock you up in catacombs, lost subway trains or other unlikely places, and you and your team must find the clues that will prevent you from losing your skin. There's nothing like it for team-building or rewarding thrill-seeking associates (unless you're annoyed by the mix of genres).
There's nothing like bungee jumping, hiking or kayaking to bond a team. They can be revitalized with digital technology, which spices up the treasure hunt with digital clues in virtual reality or QR Code mode to lead you from beacon to beacon. These discovery games are a great way to discover newly rehabilitated neighborhoods or learn about the richness of a particular heritage.
The outdoortraining courses use nature as their playground, whether it's the sea, the mountains, a river, a climbing wall or a bridge from which you throw yourself suspended from a bungee cord. These training courses engage the body and produce serious discrepancies with corporate life. They teach personal limits, decision-making, cohesion and openness to others in a new context. They enable coaches to train and assess their coaching skills. Disneyland business solution has also seized the opportunity to unite teams and sell relaxation in its theme parks.
Serious online games are all the rage, as they are less costly to design, can be created using authoring tools and, above all, are available free of charge on a wide variety of themes.
Serious games are interested in virtual worlds that exacerbate the immersive dimension and take a step closer to the real thing. There are also game jams, a kind of hackathon dedicated to the creation of video games in a limited time. Gamers and computer scientists get together to come up with new game concepts in 48 hours.
There are also corporate game creators who promote active pedagogy, or aim for the emergence of agility skills, as with Agile maker. Games and pedagogical exercises in the training room are also a pedagogical detour, where everyone experiences a time-lag to get back to their professional question. There are many exercises and games that play on the body, emotions, collective intelligence, creativity, rhythms and music, and place learners in a receptive mood for learning(Cristol, 2010).
Play has penetrated deeply into our societies, becoming a profession that makes increasing use of digital potential to capture attention.
Some managers from the "best schools" have become so serious that they no longer understand why anyone would take the detour of Kapla or Lego to project themselves into a world to be built. Yet Legos Serious Play has developed approaches to learning to work together. Others, more open-minded, promote all approaches that foster the pleasure of learning.
Sources :
Gary Gygax Wikipedia - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gygax
Framework games by Thiagi http://www.thiagi.fr/thiagipedia/jeux-cadres/
Escape games https://www.wescape.fr/cest-quoi-escape-game/
Thot article on escape games - http://cursus.edu/dossiers-articles/articles/28990/des-escape-games-toutes-les-sauces/
Free serious games Thot Cursus http://cursus.edu/institutions-formations-ressources/formation/16184/jeux-serieux-gratuits
ONISEP http://www.onisep.fr/Ressources/Univers-Metier/Metiers/concepteur-conceptrice-de-jeux-video
Game jam Paris http://www.ggjparis.fr/
Does educational gaming exist? - jlamouche - Queen Domino
https://www.trictrac.net/actus/le-jeu-educatif-existe-t-il
Sociodrama https://fr.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sociodrame
Lego serious play https://www.lego.com/en-us/seriousplay?domainredir=www.seriousplay.com
Thot's article on Lego Serious Play http://cursus.edu/dossiers-articles/articles/27347/des-briques-lego-pour-animer-des/
Management and communication: 100 exercises to train differently http://4cristol.over-blog.com/article-management-et-communication-100-exrcices-pour-former-autrement-denis-cristol-paris-esf-2010-242-pages-62375256.html
Disney Business Solution http://www.disneylandparis-business.com/fr
Agile Maker http://4cristol.over-blog.com/2017/01/agilite-manageriale.html
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