You d be surprised at how easy it is to teach critical thinking, problem solving, and cooperative learning skills using a game as a platform, not as a reward. Games allows your students to explore the rich challenges that games offer, and it s for you to use and manage. They require few materials and are easy to teach. Games are great problem solving practice. Adding a level of consciousness to how they are playing will give them excellent skills.
Games are the perfect arena for risk taking and experimentation.
The very nature of games creates a false but highly intense investment. Players want badly to win, but as soon as the game is over, this intensity usually evaporates. See what happens. Games theory, a new field of mathematical study, has been applied to the dynamics of everything from playground politics to global economics. Studying games offers the opportunity to ask students questions they rarely encounter while just playing.