Browsing by Author "Malmgren, Mikko"

In a city in Länsi-Uusimaa social skills are trained by playing a role-game that is called Synkeän louhoksen seikkailu. Game was invented for teaching social skills to children. Game has five stages that all teaches children to identify and name their feelings, give and receive positive feedback, evaluate own acts and how to resolve social conflicts. I have played role-game for many years and I was very interested about using role-game to teach social skills. Turn out that it is very challenging to measure changes in social skills, because the data was too small and I did not had right tools. So, I had to change my focus. I decided to study role-gaming as a teaching method. I wanted to study role-gaming and how to use it in theory as a teaching method. In this research curriculum and role-gamin theory are compered to find common goals. In this research I study role-gaming, its theory, concept and history. Using it as a teaching method is main focus. There is lot of similarity in many curriculum goals and role-gaming benefits. Research shows that role-gaming is in theory effective for teaching social skills. Benefit for using role-gaming as teaching method is supporting experimental and phenomenon based learning. Down side for using role-gaming is that it requires a lot of work. And there is a lack of scientific research of role-gaming as a teaching method and education for teachers how to use it.