Written by Hinna Abid

With changing trends in HE, struggling to meet the needs of a diverse student body, I actively seek new methods to enhance students’ engagement and develop their confidence in critical thinking skills. My doctoral research, in exploring educational inequalities in higher education and my own experience of being a non-traditional student, makes me actively aware of the limitations of the Socratic approach in the classroom. Whilst the Socratic approach is a useful pedagogical method, if able to establish an effective dialogue, however, it occasionally falls short in ensuring equal participation, development of oral communication skills as well as seeing the real-world application of complex concepts. This calls for a need to embrace distinct, pedagogical approaches for enhanced participation and student engagement fostering critical thinking skills and an understanding of the real-world application of concepts.

For these reasons, I have introduced the idea of games-based learning (GBL) into my teaching, where I have used games-based activities when teaching undergraduate sociology students on modules “Inequalities in Contemporary British Society” and “Education and Society”. This allows students to actively engage with sociological concepts rather than passively absorb information. Research also evidences that non-traditional students unfamiliar with the academic culture and international students, with English being their second language, benefit from GBL (Crocco et al., 2016).

Exploring the Meaning of Learning through Games-Based Activities

To further evaluate the effectiveness of GBL, funding from the School of Social Sciences Scholarship Support Fund was used to conduct an experimental workshop, employing games-based activities to understand students’ full potential. The aim of the workshop and more broadly GBL is not just about creating games for students to play, it is designing learning activities, for instance, Lego Serious Play (LSP), jigsaw puzzles, boardgames, or role play which help in understanding complex concepts and lead towards a prescribed learning objective. These games were designed with the subject content and research background in mind. For this reason, the workshop was carried out with first- and second-year undergraduate sociology students, who had background knowledge of sociological theories and concepts. The next section provides an insight into the games employed in the workshop.

1. Lego Serious Play (LSP) – In this activity the students were encouraged to build Lego models of an educational space (school or university), on the theme of “phenomenological geography”. The basic idea behind this activity was to foreground the influence of an educational physical space and think of ways in which the physical architecture of an educational space can have a profound impact on their learning experiences, ways of socialising, student-teacher relationship and so forth. Briefly elaborating on LSP, I would say that in working on the notion of model building, storytelling and reflection, LSP not only served as a catalyst to capture thoughts and viewpoints, but it also facilitated collaborative learning, shared model building and group cohesion.
   2. Identity Arena – This activity was based on the notion of fluctuating identities, as to how distinct identities (gendered, racial, classed, sexual, national) are constructed and informed within specific spatial contexts and situations, intersecting complexly. The activity was played using a rolling dice, numbered identity cards, and the overarching question “identities which advantage/disadvantage me in educational spaces.”

New Insights
The games-based activities employed in the workshop provided the space to understand complex concepts in an easy and fun way; where the students by getting involved in a hands-on activity of building Lego models and through the real-world application of their own identity experiences, showed enhanced engagement through reflection and discussion in a relaxed, trusted environment. Research also evidence that learning in a fun and playful way shapes the brain and opens imagination (Dalton, 2020; Quinn et al., 2022), where when you have fun learning it is easier to engage, and when you engage well you understand concepts better, enriching the overall learning and teaching experience. As shared by students “these games helped me engage with the course content in a more interactive and practical way, by placing myself in real life scenarios” and “it could be very useful for neurodiverse students.”

Limitations & Next Steps
Despite GBL being a helpful and playful method to improve student interaction and collaborative learning, there is little evidence of GBL being incorporated into teaching techniques; due to resource constraints as well as lack of authentic, proven benefits (Lester et al., 2023). To further build on this lack of authentic, proven benefits, strategic steps may be taken to further test and evaluate the effectiveness of GBL across different sociology course modules, with the involvement of academics expertise. Based on student feedback from the GBL workshop, emphasising on GBL to be an effective method of teaching for neurodiverse students, I would like to further research its benefits specifically for neurodiverse students. This could be implemented through pilot studies and workshops aimed at neurodiverse students, at different levels of study as well as across a range of courses.

Lego models built by participants during the GBL workshop

Hinna Abid is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sheffield and alongside her doctoral research, is very much interested in exploring novel, innovative methods of teaching.