Teaching Pre-Service Teachers to Integrate Serious Games in the Primary Education Curriculum

Curriculum integration is one of the main factors in the teachers’ decision-making process when deciding to use games in formal educational contexts. Based on this observation, we aim to introduce pre-service teachers to Game Based Learning (GBL) and Serious Games (SG) integration in the primary education curriculum. The teaching experience aims to facilitate different approaches to GBL and SG integration in the curriculum, including three types of GBL activities. Firstly, the use of SG designed for educational purposes from the start; secondly, the game creation as a learning activity through game authoring platforms; thirdly, the use of repurposed entertainment games, which, despite not having being intentionally designed for educational purposes, could be diverted for meeting the curriculum objectives of primary education. A group of 51 pre-service teachers participated in the teaching experience during which they selected a GBL activity among the three types of GBL and SG integration in the curriculum. Most of the teachers succeed to identify SG created for educational purposes, and we observed 6 entertainment games repurposed for educational objectives, none of the pre-service teachers decided to integrate a game creation activity as part of their curricular activities. We analyze the results of the teaching pre-service experience and the opportunities to introduce GBL and SG in pre-service teachers’ education.