sure that we no longer refer to, or use these theories to inform product and marketing, even if some of our clients still use it in their practice. Similarly, we must avoid inventing our own theories of education and learning, and instead align ourselves to future peer-reviewed and validated research and thinking. Game-based learning As pointed out in the section on Neuroscience above, gaming and game-based learning appears to be the optimal way to learn. Over the next few years games and gaming will increasingly take a significant role in learning. It is important to separate out Gaming from Gamification. Gamification is basically gaming-lite, whereby students get points, rewards, badges and reach levels as they learn. This is no different from the motivational gold stars or scouting badges used over the last hundred years or so and while it has some positive effects, does not have the significant impact on, or potential for, education that actual games have. The key points about gaming for education are as follows: 1. The increase in Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing games has a huge potential for teaching and learning as this allows groups of students to interact. More sophisticated simulation-based games focussing on co-operative and project-based tasks (as opposed to fighting and levelling-up) will become increasingly important. Open-world sandbox games where the players create their own scenarios and goals are particularly rich. 2. Education games will need to have the same production values as commercial games. The impact of one-task one-game educational games (e.g. ‘pop all the balloons with prime numbers’) is fast diminishing outside early years education. 3. As Blended Learning becomes more important in the classroom, collateral resources for games will be needed. For example, in the case of How to Train Your Dragon, worksheets, lit>