Serious games: board games

So why use board games for review and assessment of learning?

In the age of digital everything and analytics that can capture student engagement with learning objects, why would anyone develop a plain old-style board game for a training assessment activity? 

As an Instructional Designer, my default position is usually to go to online for the development of resources and learning opportunities, so why create paper-based resources such as board games? In a nutshell:

  1. Trainers and teachers can see and hear student engagement and student understanding and respond to that in real time. This is particularly important if students have not fully understood what has been taught and so intervention and correction from the teacher/trainer needs to occur immediately before the inaccurate learning can more deeply embed in the student/class.
  2. There has been a resurgence in interest around playing board games as people look to reconnect and communicate with real people
  3. In the remote areas of Australia (and other parts of the world) access to the internet is not always stable and reliable so having resources that can be transported easily is important
  4. Online learning doesn’t suit everyone or every learning opportunity

Games are fun but they are also an opportunity to embed all of the soft skills employers are saying they are looking for in their new hires. They (the business) can teach the content of what they want in the business, but they really want new employees to come with those communication, customer service, ability to play nicely with others and ‘can do’ attitudes that are harder to teach.

Training games…seriously


For a bit more reading:

  1. How Board Games Have Become More Popular Than Ever

Exploring why, in the age of video games, board game sales are up year on year, "board game bars" are becoming increasingly popular and hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to tabletop gaming YouTube channels.

"I do believe that many gamers have been missing the basic human necessity of human interaction," says Nick Meenachan. "It's just not the same over a microphone while playing some shoot 'em up video game."

2. Millennials are driving the board games revival

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