Promote 21st Century Skills with Board Game-Based Learning - Florence

Available in: Rome, Prague, Florence, Split

Course calendar: Check the confirmed dates

Cultural activities: The number and schedule of the cultural activities depend on the location; check the location webpage to discover more.

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Course Description

No, today’s board games have little to share with the old “classics” such as Monopoly, Risk, or Trivial Pursuit.

Following a renaissance in gaming since the ‘90s, “modern” board games – such as Pandemic, Dominion, or The Settlers of Catan – have promoted an innovative, affordable option for engaging in social interaction. Therefore, they are more popular now than ever before among people of all ages.

Being cheap and easily available, they also represent an effective way to develop vital learning skills in young and older learners for those teachers who are willing to venture into this unexplored landscape.

Are you ready to take on the challenge?

This course will help you introduce board games in your classes as a novel teaching tool to engage your learners and promote their social and cognitive growth, as well as to raise pupil’s interest in curricular content.

Depending on the selected game and the focus of the classroom activity, there are tons of lessons your pupils can learn by playing in the classroom.

While board games may not represent the preferential route to teaching every curricular subject, they are extremely successful in promoting the acquisition of key competencies for lifelong learning, such as:

--Ethical capacities: rule-following, learning to lose, respect;
--Soft skills: sharing and openness, storytelling, just competing;
--The popular “4 Cs”: communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking;
--Cognitive skills: self-regulation, working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, problem solving, risk assessment, autonomous decision-making, metacognition, learning to learn.

Board games are also optimal to make pupils practice in curricular subjects such as math, languages, or science. Finally, educational games are also suitable to familiarize learners with more unusual subjects such as environmental sustainability and the nature of European Institutions.

As a participant of the course, you will learn how to plan and conduct game-based learning activities to train your learners in the social and cognitive skills that are relevant to your subject. You will learn how to design an effective gaming session, how to explain the game and the rules, how to make your pupils play, and how to debrief about the gaming experience.

The course proposes a hands-on and collegial approach. We will play a wide variety of titles of the last decade (from the simplest to some more complex) to help you acquire the practical understanding necessary to re-propose them in your classroom. After each session, we will also discuss what skills and competences the game may scaffold in different age groups (6-13-years-old), considering the different motivations and needs of primary and secondary school students.

What are you still waiting for? By the end of the course, you will be ready to surprise your students with an engaging activity, and to exploit a new active learning paradigm to develop their ethical, social, and cognitive skills.

Continue reading: Discover the learning outcomes and the tentative schedule of this course.

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Course categories: Creativity and Soft Skills and Classroom Management

Creativity and Soft Skills: By fostering critical thinking and communicative abilities, an educator can develop better relationships with students, colleagues, and students’ parents, thus obtaining higher learning outcomes. If you want to expand both your creative thinking and storytelling skills, you should check out our Creativity and Soft Skills courses. They can help you design stimulating activities which aim to promote entrepreneurship and collaboration among your students.

Classroom Management: Do you want your students to be more focused in class? Thanks to the new educational techniques (such as the flipped classroom, project-based learning, remote teaching, collaborative learning, student-centered learning) your students will participate in class with more enthusiasm creating a fruitful and healthier classroom environment. In our Classroom Management courses, you will enhance your ability to include students with special needs and motivate everyone. Furthermore, you will have the chance of learning how to manage a multicultural classroom and prevent possible conflicts.

Discover other courses on:

• Collaboration
• Communication and social skills
• Critical thinking and problem solving
• Game-based Learning and Gamification