A Future Focus of Gaming

Abstract

The authors discuss the instruction of soft skills by games and simulations as a future direction for the use of educational gaming in P-12 education. Technical or hard skills are taught in the educational curriculum; however, soft skills training, such as communication, collaboration, decision-making, problem-solving, negotiation, and leadership, are lacking. Soft skills training through games and simulations have been successful in areas such as the military, medicine, business, and disaster response, as well as those individuals with learning disabilities; therefore, the authors investigate the potential for soft skills training using games and simulations. In addition to instruction of soft skills, this article also addresses the inherent nature of games and simulations as teaching and assessment tools.

Teaching Soft Skills in Engineering Education: An European Perspective

“…Soft skills ICT-based support was an active topic during recent years. Several ICT based services, commercial and noncommercial, can be found in the scientific literature which is or may be deployed in the context of HE for fostering the development of desirable skills [33][34][35][36][37][38]. Particularly in the context of Erasmus+ projects [36,37,49,56,63] there was a lot of interest in designing tools that facilitate the development of this kind of competences.…”

“…The use of games to support the instruction of soft skills was acknowledged by existing literature [33]. Games have the main advantage over traditional education when used for training: they are focused on practice.…”