Learning Through Play (An Educational Focus)

play creates powerful learning opportunities cutting across all areas of development

Play is any activity engaged in for leisure or fun. The importance is placed in the process rather than an endpoint or goal. Play is a way to engage the brain and body in fun activities performed for self-amusement that have behavioural, social, and psychomotor rewards. These rewards come from within a child; being an enjoyable and spontaneous activity.

Play is an essential part of our growth and development as humans. It is one of the most important ways in which young children gain essential knowledge and skills. This concept allows children to explore their minds to learn about cause and effect, to explore the environments around them, to learn social and psychomotor skills and to learn communications through their emotions. This, in turn, opens their brain to cognitive thinking. When children play, they don’t consider it as learning, however, their play creates powerful learning opportunities cutting across all areas of development.

Seeing as play controls huge importance in our brain developing fully, how can we then incorporate learning through this activity? According to a Unicef article released in 2018, play-based learning can be instrumental in building lifelong learners and supporting children’s overall development.

Regardless of background, country or class, everybody plays; children learn to communicate as well as learn self-advocacy skills. Children also learn leadership and group skills. Play satisfies a basic human need to create through imagination. This is a very key resource in a knowledge-driven world.

So how does gaming as a form of play affect our educational development? Games are confined spaces that challenge the interpretation and optimizing of different rules and tactics as well as time and space. According to a 2013 research article conducted by the American Psychological Association, a meta-analysis found that playing certain video games like shooter games improved a player’s capacity to properly think about objects in three dimensions just as well as academic courses designed to enhance these same skills. They also suggested that video games that encourage cooperation have an effect on gamers, making them more helpful to people. Multiplayer games turn into virtual social communities, where gamers need to make decisions about whom to trust or reject and how to lead a group.

A good example of a game aiding learning would be Minecraft. In the game players explore a pixelated world in which they discover craft tools and raw materials. Players are able to build and restructure the environment in the game and are allowed to battle with computer-created villains. This popular game helps develop creative thinking, problem-solving, geometry skills and resource management in the lives of kids between the ages of 7- 13+.

Play has and will always be a crucial way of engaging our brains to learn and assimilate certain cognitive functions without us even thinking about it. The fact that we’re not conscious about these learnings doesn’t mean that they aren’t happening to us.