Social Constructivism: Games, Simulations, Cases, and Problem Solving
All four of the instructional approaches covered in this section involve
students in interesting, "real" activities. We say "real" even though many
games are clearly not realistic. Rescuing a downed spaceship on the planet
Zork is not a REAL activity. We use the term real in another sense. All
of these approaches involve students in learning about, playing in, or
solving problems in an environment that has rules or patterns. Games have
rules, simulations respond in certain ways when you do this or that, cases
tell a story about some situation or event and students try to understand
why certain things happened as they did, and problems presented to students
can be solved by thinking through ways of tackling it. We are not saying
that there is only one way to solve a particular problem, or only one strategy
that can win a particular game. Life, and the instructional approaches
discussed here, are much too complex for that. What we are saying is that
all these approaches involve students making decisions in situations where
the results are not simply random events. There are patterns to figure
out, associations and links between this strategy and that result, and
so on.
Why are these approaches all placed under social constructivist? Because
most of the time, when they are used in classrooms they involve groups
of students working and playing together. Let's look at each approach in
more detail.
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