Games and STEM, an unconventional partnership

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are essential in our day to day, being crucial in the effective improvement of our quality of life, as well as the possibility of exploring complex elements and making fascinating discoveries.

In parallel, we also have the development of games, which ended up growing exponentially in the late 20th century to the present moment, evolving in an extreme way and offering a vast amount of unique experiences that will make your time disappear in the blink of an eye.

Now you must be asking yourself, “But can games teach complex subjects?” Our answer is yes, you can, and much better than you think, see below some examples:

Head-breaking games

They are easy games to play, but difficult to become a professional, as they are games that involve a level of logic and advanced knowledge.

Games like Chess and Sudoku develop mathematical and cognitive skills, forcing children to think more than once and anticipate possible moves (based on their available movements, often developing a level of memory that allows them to retain a huge amount of games in the mind).

Simulation Games

These games are common in our day to day, be they on mobile, tablet, computer or even on consoles. We all remember the days when we played Farmville on Facebook - a simulator of a fictional farm.

There are numerous simulation games today, all of them addressing different topics, with changed formulas and challenges, these types of games have as their main objective the planning and analysis of data for the good growth of your farm/city/restaurant/shop/hospital or any other profession.

Children learn to manage their own resources, to try to understand which are the best investments, making it possible to calculate the profit that the challenges provide per hour.

Construction Games

Famous games, such as Minecraft and Roblox, allow the development of creativity, design skills and problem solving, due to the varied challenges that these games provide.Minecraft is seen by many people as a game dedicated to children, but did you know that this is a myth?

For example, there is a system within minecraft that simulates electricity and many own devices that interact with this electricity, allowing a high level of engineering.

In addition to Minecraft, there are many more games that are focused on building factories, nuclear reactors and much more, all with a basic and advanced level of engineering, in order to force players to think of a way to overcome challenges intelligently and dynamically.

Programming games

In addition to traditional games dedicated to entertainment, there are also own games for learning programming, in an environment that is simple to use and quite efficient in retaining information.

A good example is Scratch, a platform dedicated to children with the aim of teaching programming, using a system of “blocks” where each part of the code corresponds to an action, and needs to be inserted in the right place, in order to create the desired interaction or behavior.

Simulators

Unlike simulation games, simulators aim to simulate (with the maximum possible accuracy) various aspects of our day to day, such as testing cars on specific streets, experimenting with the laws of physics on the various available planets, understanding what would happen if the earth stopped having gravity, among others.

An interesting game relevant to this topic is SpaceEngine, which explores many science-related topics such as “Newtonian Physics”, planets, stars, galaxies, comets and stellar clouds, along with the specific properties of each.

SHARKCODERS believes that teaching methodology is adapting to new technologies, presenting more and more challenges that traditional methods cannot overcome.

Our services are delivered with these challenges in mind, providing children and adolescents with an exclusive and comfortable level of education (Face-to-face or Remote), using various games to train students' skills, create obstacles that train the mind and guarantee fun, thus preparing the Geniuses of Tomorrow.