Game-based learning has always been an intriguing subject, I mean, can you really learn by playing computer-based games? I've seen first-hand how you can learn and have fun with the whiteboard and not realise you've been learning, but can this transfer to games in the classroom?

It's a subject that has already been blogged about repeatedly (just check out the great Ollie Bray's blog site for plenty of reference material about using games in the classroom) and there's even a conference dedicated to it - the 2010 Game Based Learning conference in London.

So while I don't want to reinvent what's already been talked about, I did find it interesting when I came upon this new title from Robert Powell Publications called 'Race to Success' - covering maths, english & science, there are over 30,000 questions in this series alone.

Race to Success

This latest title from Robert Powell seeks to engage and encourage participation through competition - and with integration with Promethean's ActivExpression devices, you don't need to be worried about the shy or the anxious being left behind (and the teacher can still store, analyse and revisit all the class data collected).

Every student is allocated an ActivExpression device that corresponds to a race car and at ten second intervals the race is stopped for the teacher to bring up a questions, which is then offered to the 'drivers'. If you answer correctly, then your race car accelerates ahead. So by encouraging competition and using a platform that all kids can identify with, the students are learning while enjoying themselves.

The questions are offered in a simple template design that most users of ActivExpression will be familiar with and include text, images and audio questions. For example, you could have a music question "Can you name the composer of this piece of music?" or even a languages question. All answers can be stored and the teacher can go back and analyse the data from the tests to see who learned what and which questions the class struggled with.

Racing Can be a Team Effort!

As well as 'racing' against each other individually, drivers can also be allocated teams. This way the learning and the contribution moves from a single focus to a group focus. The team just has to achieve more than 50% of the answers correctly for the car to move on, with the team answering the most questions correctly winning the race.

Race on Over to YouTube to Learn More

If you want to find out about this latest title to help students learn through a game-based approach, then watch this YouTube video from Robert Powell Publications.

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