Dissertation

Blog

This blog is going to record the process of my dissertation. The title of my dissertation is “Can Gaming be Used as an Effective Teaching Tool?”. I’m interested in this subject as I want to be able to help people who find traditional teaching methods difficult to understand, and also help all students to make education more enjoyable. I have found through my own experience that it’s very important to make education engaging and exciting – games can be a pathway to more enjoyable education.

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So far I have around three thousand and five hundred words – the boundaries for the dissertation are six to ten thousand, with ten percent either way. I want to do the best I can on this dissertation as I enjoy the subject area and also writing and researching.

I’ve now updated my question to talk about mainly the motivation and engagement properties of games.

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I’ve now finished writing my dissertation, and it was a really interesting experience. I have learnt a lot throughout the time I spent writing it. I feel like it was a big challenge, having not written an essay in a while, let alone an essay / dissertation of this length and depth. As for my question, I decided to change it to focus on motivation and engagement about half way through the writing process. This section from my abstract describes it:

This dissertation will focus on the subject of educational gaming. It will be investigating the question of “can gaming be used as an effective teaching tool to enhance and promote motivation and engagement within education?” Ideas which will be explored include; what impact gaming has on education, and how different learning styles can be helped by gaming in education. These questions will be investigated as some people have found educational games to be helpful with learning. It will also look at this area in depth to determine whether or not gaming can be used as an effective tool to help students’ education to be more engaging and motivational. It will look at the link between gaming and education, the experience of play, combining work and play, and how play helps children understand the world around them. It will also look at the use of technology to support individual learning styles, and discuss the concept of the Net Generation, otherwise known as Digital Natives, and explore the effect that games have within education. Hopefully this dissertation will show that gaming can be an important part of education and that it can make education more enjoyable, motivating, and engaging.