Game sense is an instructional approach that emphasizes teaching tactics and decision making in games. It presents modified game forms to students to build understanding of games. This avoids tedious skill drills and isolates the importance of skills within the context of the game. The teacher acts as a guide, maintaining interest through participation and ensuring students understand content by stimulating them to reach their potential through lesson alterations. Game sense allows incorporation of movement, problem-solving, decision making, interaction and communication to actively participate. It links to the PDHPE syllabus outcomes of performing and refining movement skills in various situations and applying strategies to solve movement challenges.
2. What is Game Sense?
• Game sense is described as instructional approach that seeks to emphasise the learning of
tactics and decision making. In this sense, the structured game is presented to children as a
problem, one that students must play in order to develop their perceptions of what works
and what doesn’t.
• Presents generic game forms to build an appreciation and understanding of the game itself.
These games can be altered according to the developmental level of the children and at the
discretion of the teacher, thus making them easier or harder depending on the abilities of
the group
• By emphasising a game sense approach, students avoid the tediousness of technical skill
drills and the isolation that often comes with them.
• Students still develop their technique and skill execution, however, they first learn through
the game why such skills are important and how they are beneficial in the context of the
particular game. In this sense, students learn the tactical awareness and skill application
instead of being trained in skillsets without a contextual background
(Breed and Spittle, 2011)
3. What is Game Sense?
• Games are typically split into four separate categories. Games are classified into these
categories based on intent, concepts, skills, player roles, playing areas, offensive and
defensive strategies.The four categories are:
• Striking games such as baseball, cricket and kickball
• Invasion games such as basketball, football and soccer
• Net games such as volleyball, tennis and badminton
• Target games such as archery, bowling and lawn bowls
• The game sense approach seeks to teach students to transfer the basic skills and tactics
between games belonging to the same category in order to build on their overarching skill
sets to ensure competence across multiple sports and activities.
(Griffin and Butler, 2005)
4. What is Game Sense?
• In a game sense approach the teacher acts as a guide for the lesson.A teacher using game
sense must ensure:
1. Maintain interest through maximum participation (no student should ever be sitting still or not involved in the game)
2. Take responsibility for players understanding the content
3. Stimulating players to reach their potential (altering the lesson to suit the needs of the students)
4. Explain the game in a way that fosters integrity and fair play
• The alteration of games is of great importance to the success of game sense lessons.
Teachers should use their discretion to change the lesson as is necessary, no game should
be dominated by particular students or not work efficiently. Game sense strategy allows
the easy incorporation of changes disguised as new challenges and obstacles to overcome.
(Light, 2012)
5. Benefits of Game Sense
• Game sense activities focus on the students’ abilities, allowing lessons to be altered to
always heighten their skill sets to a higher level
• These changes also mean students are placed on more equal footing, rather than the lesson
being dominated by particularly competent students
• Students learn the appropriate skills by actually playing, giving important context to what
they are learning. By doing this students also avoid tedious drill exercises which can give
negative impressions of a game due to repetition and the sense of “why are we doing this?”
• Game sense activities also allow complete incorporation of the essential skills of moving,
problem-solving, decision making, interacting and communicating in order to actively
participate in activities
• Students are always participating in game sense activities.This avoids students normalising
‘resting’ and seeking opportunities to avoid physical activity which can have long term
consequences for participation levels.
6. Links to the Syllabus
• PD2-4 performs and refines movement skills in a variety of sequences and
situations
• PD2-5 applies strategies to solve movement challenges
• PD2-11 combines movement skills and concepts to effectively create and perform
movement sequences
The game sense approach finds a number of links in the Stage 2 PDHPE Syllabus,
particularly in the ‘Movement Skill and Performance’ strand.The intrinsic strengths in
a game sense approach allow students to easily work toward these outcomes due to
the importance of skills, strategies and concepts to solve problems in this teaching
style.
(NESA, 2018)
7. References
• Griffin, L.L., & Butler, J. (2005). Teaching Games forUnderstanding:Theory, Research, and
Practice. Illinois,United States: Human Kinetics.
• Kirk, D., MacDonald, D., & O’Sullivan, M. (2006). Handbook of Physical Education.California,
United States: SAGE Publishing.
• Light, R. (2012). GameSense: Pedagogy for Performance, Participation and Enjoyment.
London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
• NSW Education Standards Authority [NESA]. (2018). Personal Development, Health and
Physical Education K–10 Syllabus. Retrieved from
https://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/wcm/connect/2f657694-dc52-48ba-a440-
9256e92c00e3/pdhpe-k-10-syllabus-2018-pdf.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CVID=
