We are past-mid-2020, and a huge number of schools around the globe took their traditional classroom sessions into the digital world, something most of them dreamed of doing, but were suddenly pushed off the airplane while still considering if they knew how to operate the parachute. For good or bad, this is a big step towards ubiquitous learning, even if schools are slowly trying to bring children back to the classroom.

Statistics I came across support my perception as a father, uncle, and as part as friends’ journey with their children through the school challenges during Covid-19 pandemics, and they say that, even using good digital platform, a great number of students perceive it as a downgrade, and most parents as well.

https://en.unesco.org/news/global-education-monitoring-gem-report-2020

http://www.guide2research.com/research/online-education-statistics

https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2020/08/sg_policy_brief_covid-19_and_education_august_2020.pdf

Taking into account factors like access to technology and good internet, pertinent household discipline during confinement, or parents and tutors’ time to follow the children up while doing home office, virtual schooling has presented as many problems as it has solved them. It is true connectivity is much higher and both parents and teachers can have a clear view of students’ progress in real time, but on the other hand, students lost their established school-ground social interactions, now fully immersed in social media, which they heavily perceive as a source of entertainment and fun, and not obligations and “boring stuff like math or sciences”.

Using entertainment to teach is not news anymore, but games prompt actions and ideas that videos and texts do not, and being with teenagers doing digital schoolwork during confinement showed me that they search for games about the new subject they have to learn, they install a few, then go back to the school portal, because the games do not fulfill their needs. The current idea is that “games that look like they only exist to teach are boring,” meaning they want the fun first, or that the game challenges are related to the fun part of the game, and not the learning part.

Therefore, mobile games that apply the real-world use of the subjects in fun ways, and sneak in the “learning part” have a lot of room in this new world. Student’s behavior can be constantly monitored, not only through navigation and answers to tests, but also the way they move characters around, interact to each other, and have special degrees of freedom in a virtual space that brings them back into a place they can see each other (or their avatar), visit different places of the school, and attend “virtual classrooms” that take them to different worlds where they will use and hone their skills. That is not there yet!