Why educational games are important for adults

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Educational games are games designed to help players learn about a specific subject or help them to practise specific skills. They are a product of the gamification of learning, which is where typically less playful subjects like education have game mechanics applied to them in order to make them more fun.

In an educational game, psychological levers are utilised to appeal to a student’s competitive nature, their curiosity, and their need to make progress. This is all executed with the aim of improving a player’s understanding of different subjects, or their proficiency at certain skills. Online educational video games are not just useful for helping children learn in school, but offer particular utility when it comes to adult students.

Given that adult students will typically be more time-crunched and less likely to have teachers or trainers readily available, playable experiences or activities offer an engaging medium through which to learn. Educational games for adults can be made to complement programmes of professional training or higher education.

Working from home

With more people working from home, or adopting a hybrid structure with less office days than previous generations of workers, staff training procedures have had to move on. The days of in-house trainers being the norm are gone. The reality is that applying those old methods to remote working practices like video calls can be unproductive and unengaging, and also suffer from occasional technical problems – microphones not being muted, settings on machines disrupting group call training sessions, and Wi-Fi dropouts.

Online educational games for adults, specifically for professionals getting on-the-job training, help by offering a really practical option for engaging adults in what they need to learn in an easily available format. They also help you, as a trainer or human resources professional, gather data on how well students are engaging with the topic. On a larger scale, you can use the data you collect to see how effective your educational games are proving, informing the development of your ongoing strategy.

Onboarding new hires

With the hybrid and home working structures that typify most organisations, making onboarding into an online educational game can be a less labour-intensive, more engaging way to remotely onboard your new employees. A format such as the Dynamic Path™ allows you to customise a bespoke learning path for new employees, allowing you to customise a series of interactive levels or modules of online learning activities that they can play through.

The Dynamic Path™ gives you access to all of Drimify’s games, meaning you can mix up Question & Answer Games with levels of purely informative content. Everything is fully customisable, allowing you to perfectly tailor each level to different aspects of your organisation, as well as tailoring the level of difficulty to the requirements of your students.

Continuing education with responsibilities

Being a mature or adult student comes with responsibilities that younger students don’t have to consider. Families, existing financial and logistical responsibilities impose time penalties, trump school commitments in their importance, and eat into available learning time. While a university student on campus with no job or child to consider may be able to hammer through reference books and make meticulous notes, adult learners can benefit greatly from more efficient, more easily available teaching methods.

Creating online learning games can be a great way to create fun and immersive learning experiences for adults. Because all of Drimify’s games are online and built mobile-first, they can be played on any modern device through a link or a QR code. They can be played at any time, available around an adult student’s existing responsibilities.

Learning new skills

Apart from school and playing with friends, a lot of kids spend their free time learning different skills and participating in different activities, be they sports, musical instruments, or other hobbies. Coaching industries and modern societal attitudes are generally geared towards children learning new skills, with adults expected to have mastered all they can master after a certain point.

Think about the one adult white belt learning karate with a group of 12-year-olds, or count how many times you’ve seen an adult learning to ride a bike with stabilisers. It’s harder for adults to start being novices learning a new skill because they don’t have the same amount of free time. Those that make that time can then find themselves the exception, and as such feel isolated.

However, educational games might provide an answer to this problem. A great example of this is Rocksmith, a video game released by Ubisoft in 2011 that teaches players how to play the guitar. Unlike the already popular Guitar Hero, which just utilised a guitar shaped controller with regular play proving fun, but yielding no transferable musical skills, Rocksmith allowed any electrical guitar to be plugged in and used as a controller, with the game’s difficulty constantly adapting to a player’s improving skill level. This game effectively leveraged game mechanics to deliver a fun learning experience for adults and children.

Maintaining cognitive ability

As adults move out of formal education, and potentially move into careers with less training opportunities or chances to problem solve, or even retirement, they can find themselves “exercising” their brains less. This is where playing brain training games can help.

While perhaps sitting adjacent to the category of an educational game, in that it has no specific learning outcome except to help exercise the mind, playing brain training games can serve to slow down cognitive decline, maintain working memory, and encourage mental plasticity in players. Games with brain training utility such as 2048, a Crossword Puzzle or the Memory Game, can be added to educational games or programmes of gamified learning to provide that added benefit to the experience you’re delivering, while still being customisable to the topic being taught.

Make educational games for adults easily

Online educational games for adults, when utilised thoughtfully, can offer an immersive learning experience that they can engage with at any time, and play on any modern device. They help adults to acquire new knowledge and pick up different skills in a fun and engaging way, develop professionally, and even provide learning opportunities that would otherwise have passed them by.

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