A visit to Mexico
I have been invited by the organizers of the 10º Congreso Internacional y 13º Nacional de Material Didáctico Innovador (International Conference on Innovative Educational Materials) to visit Mexico City next week.
There I will deliver a lecture about game-based learning. I am expecting a mixed audience on the topic of GBL: Supporters, detractors and just oblivious. Thus, I will start with a short pitch on the (potential) benefits about game-based learning. However, my intention goes beyond merely proselytizing.
In the last few years conducting GBL research, we have met more barriers than actual opportunities. In this talk I also try to raise awareness on the fact that GBL, no matter how exciting, is still an emerging trend with little solid facts about their power as educational tools. Society is not really ready for games, which are still considered as an industry that only targets male kids (and actually, only targets them in order to turn them into psychopaths). In addition, digital games can be disruptive in a classroom and will certainly meet more opposition than support from teachers. I will try to review these potential issues and give some ideas about how to tackle these problems, including our own research.
I hope I will be able to provoke a reaction on the audience, reducing the opposition or detractors, challenging supporters to think about new research questions and, most of all, sparking new ideas in the mind of those oblivious to games as an educational medium.
I will let you know whether I succeeded in a couple of weeks (or in three months, given my blogging habits).
