Integration of Digital Games Into Pedagogical Practice: Contributions and Challenges to Teacher Training

Introduction

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the covid-19 pandemic directly impacting all sectors of society, but sharply in education (De Aguiar, 2020), causing the rapid change from a paradigm of face-to-face classes to a form of remote education. This abrupt change caused fear and insecurity and provided opportunities for new questioning, reflections, and learning.

The teaching practices developed during this time of social isolation aimed at remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020) required the incorporation of digital technologies as a vector capable of overcoming the distance between educational institutions and students. Given the limitations imposed by the covid-19 pandemic, digital technologies have become a condition for most teaching and learning processes at different levels of education. According to Almeida and Alves (2020), in the pandemic scenario caused by covid-19, schools and universities were led to deploy or use digital platforms and virtual learning environments to achieve remote education. For the authors, both teachers and students have encountered many difficulties in remote education, by a lack of access to the necessary digital technologies, not having a family environment conducive to learning, as well as a lack of teacher training.

When analyzing the usability of digital technologies in education during the pandemic triggered by covid-19, Soares and Colares (2020) state that this has been a time of many discoveries in the field of education. Digital technologies have been means for sharing and appropriation of knowledge. According to Almeida and Alves (2020), teachers involved in the educational process during the pandemic developed didactic activities capable of sharpening the students’ protagonism in their learning process.

During the pandemic, the various pedagogical initiatives and practices reinforce that the simple adoption of digital technologies is not enough to address the challenges related to pedagogical mediation, social interaction, learning, and assessment. The solution to the challenges involves teacher training, reflection on teaching conditions, development of digital competencies, diversification of strategies and resources, and flexibility of pedagogical processes.

In the diversification of strategies and resources needed during the pandemic period, this chapter analyzes how digital games have been incorporated into pedagogical practices to reflect on the challenges and transformations in education and their implications for teacher training. Digital games can be characterized as a playful activity composed of a series of actions and decisions (Schuytema, 2008) guided by clear goals and challenges compatible with the player’s level (Kiili, 2005), anchored in rules (Juul, 2005; McGonigal, 2012) and offering immediate feedback to the player (McGonigal, 2012).

Digital games have a historical trajectory very much linked to entertainment, starting with games with simple mechanics and little quality, such as Pong, which simulates a tennis match, but that still attracted the attention of many players. The technological development allowed the access and options of devices used to play to be widened and disseminated, and its applications beyond entertainment were also expanded. Authors such as Squires (2003) announce that already in this period, digital games have stood out as means to promote learning. According to the author, “today’s games are much more complex, are designed to be learned by their players over 10, 20, or even 200 hours, and recruit sophisticated forms of thinking, including the understanding of complex systems, the creative expression with dig tools, and the formation and manipulation of social networks” (p. 17).