A Third of British Teachers Use Video Games in Class

Here’s an interesting survey from January of last year, reported by the BBC, indicating a third of British teachers use video games in the classroom, with most agreeing that video games are useful in education. Nesta Futurelab conducted the survey:

The survey of 1,000 teachers in England and Wales suggests a quarter also personally use them in their free time.

 

Over half of the 1000 teachers questioned by Nesta Futurelab said they would use them in future and believed they were a “good motivational tool”.

Read the complete report here. Check out Futurelab’s Teaching with Games site here.

This entry was posted on August 5, 2007 at 5:31 pm and is filed under BBC, Game Discussion, Game Studies, Making Video Games, Media, Questions, Research, Serious Games, Video Game Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “A Third of British Teachers Use Video Games in Class”

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  3. Julie McLeod Says:
    August 7, 2007 at 7:07 am

    Thanks for this post, John. From a survey recently done by a colleague here in the states, I would say we are far behind these UK statistics. How do you think we compare? What do you think that means for US education?

  4. John Rice Says:
    August 7, 2007 at 8:23 am

    Julie, I’d be interested in looking at your colleague’s study. I’ve seen very little on the topic stateside, but then I haven’t been looking for it. I do recall a survey of software installed on classroom computers, but that was back in 1999, I think.

    From what I can tell, if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say stateside teachers are more interested in getting their kids to pass the state exams, and probably look down their noses a bit at instructional gaming. And, since most every state uses a different exam, an instructional game might have to offer alignment to multiple standards before widespread adoption, something that is additionally time consuming. (Although, one would think alignment to ISTE’s NETS would suffice.)

    European academics as a whole seem very interested in serious games, if not always games aimed at the classroom. There is a whole spate of research and conferences over there that seems to rival or surpass North American efforts in many instances.

    JR

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    October 27, 2007 at 9:22 am

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