Enhancing Project Management Skills Through Gaming

  Career Development   Knowledge Shelf  

You must be thinking: “What? Computer games for education? No — these two do not go together. You must be kidding!” You got it right: I am kidding, literally! Sometimes a very serious subject is best understood if you add some fun to it. Recently, a 7-year-old boy was in the news for saving his 4-year-old sister from drowning in their home’s swimming pool. He administered CPR to his sister and brought her back to life. When he was asked where he had learned how to do CPR, he gave a very interesting answer: He watched it in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”

I won’t get into why a 7-year-old child was watching an R-rated movie; I will leave that decision to his parents! The fact of the matter is that this child was watching the movie for entertainment and, in the process, learned something very useful. The interesting thing is that the child didn’t realize he had learned the technique — it seeped into his subconscious memory, yet he was able to use it when needed very spontaneously. This is one of the characteristics of “funucation.” When “fun” and “education” are combined, the learner is engrossed in having fun and sometimes does not realize that he or she has learned something valuable without being coerced into a training session and trying to memorize some theories, which would …

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