Game based learning works for young audiences. It’s time to bring game based education to adult learners. When combined with Web3 concepts, completely new ways of building skills with adult learners emerge. This is an immersive workshop in which participants will experience a game-based learning challenge with the opportunity for discussion & critique.
Learning is a catalyst for workplace transformation, how industry vanguards keep their employees moving along the steep curve of digital transformation. But most professional development and workplace learning experiences feel prescriptive and uninspired; they fail to capture a learner’s attention and then, unsurprisingly, struggle to create lasting behavior change.
Games — serious games, not gamification — are increasingly used as K12 teaching tools. Why? Because they work! Games have been shown to increase participation, foster SEL (social and emotional learning), improve attitudes toward learning, and motivate learners to take risks. Immersive, nonlinear game environments, featured in popular games such as Minecraft, add new layers of interactivity, exploration, and inspiration. It’s exciting to see environments like these being integrated more and more into K-12 curricula, but it's time for game-based learning to grow up. 3D worlds enable novel skill building, safe opportunities to take risks, and new modes of interaction that improve remote collaboration (which is an essential need due to the recent rise of hybrid working arrangements). When combined with Web3 concepts, such as tokenization and decentralization, completely new ways of building skills with adult learners emerge.
In this session, Beth will lead participants through an immersive game, and then facilitate a converstaion about the opportunities and challenges associated with developing and deploying immersive learning games for adult audiences. Beth will talk about the values embedded in the Esme GEMS (Game-based Experiential Management Scenarios) program, namely: 1) presenting opportunities for novel skill building, 2) fostering small group collaboration, 3) blending immersion and abstraction effectively, 4) enabling different types of “convening” through persistent social spaces and interactive challenge zones, and 5) opening up new learning models, such as learn-to-earn and learning DAOs.