Soft Skills in Game-Based Learning

Exploring the acquisition of curricular knowledge and soft skills in game-based learning

The research I undertook for my M.Ed involved teaching economic and political systems to grade 9 students in a game-based learning environment. We used Minecraft to explore through play how those systems tie together. However, the purpose of my research was not to evaluate the curricular learning, but rather to observe the emtergence of soft-skills in a game-based classroom.

The entire paper can be read by clicking the above link. This page contains some of the artifacts from the research.

The chart to the left is the economy that the two teams of grade 9 students agreed upon. Where the economy became interesting was when the arguments would ensue between teams about the value of a particular item. It was crucial that both teams agree on the values, so this took some time. Inevitably, someone would advocate for dirt as being worth something, and the opposing team would loudly and impatiently “explain” why this is a ridiculous idea.

A difficult concept to teach in the social studies classroom can be the idea that the economic value can be traded either way. This concept was driven home during our game when a student realized that if it would cost him 10 diamonds for one blaze rod, that meant he could also trade one blaze rod for 10 diamonds. He proceeded to make his way into “the nether” to find and return with blaze rods. He was successful in this endeavor, and as such earned his team many stacks of diamonds. The other team was jawdropped.

The above image is a slide that I prepared for one of our synchronous, online classes. We had to identify things that were going well, and things that were presenting challenges. As I only had one class with which to conduct my research, I felt the pressure to “do it right” as there would be no opportunity to correct or amend my errors. Junior high is precarious when it comes to them following the lead of others. When a “popular kid” stated vocally that they were not going to have their parents sign the consent to participate, my projected number of participants took a nose dive causing me a great deal of stress!

Much further into the research, we had another synchronous session for which we had to create another “slide” to summarize the progress. The small sample population continued to present a challenge to this research.