Fresh from the U.S. Department of Education’s Games for Learning Summit at NYU, Chris Aviles makes some bold predictions about the future of education. By 2030, he believes:
* Games will help teach and assess students.
* Students will learn to code by creating their own games made to solve problems in their community.
* Students will learn by participating in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). In ARGs like the pandemic-simulation, “Scorch,” that Aviles created with Pearson, students will become part of a networked narrative and work collaboratively. In Scorch, students assume virtual roles in specific areas such as government, biology, business, and communication and have to find solutions to problems created in the game that change daily according to the students’ actions (or inaction).
* In this gamified future, the focus will be on students learning soft skills such as collaboration, curation, leadership, reflection, and creativity as they learn content from the traditional subject areas in response to the demands of the gaming roles they adopt.
