Human Minds and Games as Learning

Paintball as Learning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Milites Dei takes theoretical learning such as Specialist Security Practices NQF Level 4, SAQA ID 57713 and adds survival and bush craft games to it. In this way students physically engage in nature as well as the challenges there within. The facilitators thereafter relate the theories and practical games back and forth. Concepts such as water procurement, building a shelter from bushes, packing sandbags, bush ovens, paintball gun games, obstacles, tracking, and hiking, etcetera are explored. This is very similar to learning through playing computer games.

On Minecraft’s Web Page (http://www.minecraft.net) the creators write ‘… is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things. It can also be about adventuring with friends or watching the sun rise over a blocky ocean. It’s pretty…’

In Milites Dei’s Bush Camp Ego and on the Sanderson Farm it is pretty as well and the games engaged in facilitates learning. There are no monsters.

In a Stanford Report, March 1, 2013 by RF Mackay called “Playing to learn: Panelists at Stanford discussion say using games as an educational tool provides opportunities for deeper learning. Interaction and opportunities to make choices are among the virtues of the new generation of educational games, experts say.”  In the same article Mackay elaborates on the theories by James Gee, a professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, who holds degrees in philosophy and linguistics from Stanford, Gee explains ‘… human minds are plug-and-play devices; they’re not meant to be used alone. They’re meant to be used in networks. Games allow us to do that – they allow us to use what Gee calls “collective intelligence” ‘. Available at http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/march/games-education-tool-030113.html