Choosing the right online games does boos your productivity
Imagine being on a diet where everything you eat is healthy yet amazingly tasty? This however is far from the reality and many times, we end up compromising on the taste to maintain a healthy diet or vice-versa. The relationship between education and entertainment is also somewhat similar. While cyber-loafing or choosing entertainment over the internet can end up hampering your productivity and wasting your time [Source- Consequences Of Cyberloafing –A Literature Review], online education can get extremely dull and boring too. So how do you try and get the best of both worlds without compromising on either?
Unlike many programs that are hiding behind the veil of pure entertainment, there are many websites and platforms that can offer you both. These platforms help you boost your productivity and add value to your time rather than just make you feel like you have become a screen zombie.
Read the following ways that can help you turn entertainment educational, by enabling you to learn something new and increase your productivity by heaps.
Virtual Tourism
The pandemic has put a damper to all our travel plans. Gone are the days of wanderlust and travel junkies. Travelling anywhere has not only become more expensive but has also become very risky. In spite of numerous safety precautions and sanitization, contracting the Corona virus has become very easy. In such times how do you satiate your thirst to explore new cultures and locations? This is where virtual tourism comes into the picture.
Thanks to the progressive technologies such as AR/ VR (artificial reality and virtual reality), you can virtually visit many locations to learn about the historical sites and monuments. You can even choose guided virtual tours wherein a guide will provide you an educational trip of all the must-visit locations with real-time experience.
Learning A New Language
Learning a new language doesn’t always need to be expensive and boring. The internet can be a great and fun place to learn new languages. While Google Translate is the first tool that comes to our mind, there are other ways that you can learn new languages too. You could change the language of your favorite shows or watch movies in a language of your choosing and subtitles to learn a new dialect.
You could even visit platforms like WeSpeke, HiNative etc that allow you to chat with people from different countries and learn their native language. You can even try other methods like changing the language of your interface or seeking out recipes in their native languages.
Playing Educational And Stimulative Games
Gone are the days, where we just had a few games like Mario, Pac-Man,Tetris etc.for our entertainment. While we may feel nostalgic whenever these games are mentioned, the sheer volume of games available on the internet today can get very overwhelming. How do we then begin to choose games that can actually turn out to be beneficial for us? This is where sites like plays.org come in.
They offer a plethora of options such as educational games that can help you increase your typing speed, improve your calculating ability and offer other stimulating games. You can even opt for playing classic games such as chess, puzzles, quizzes, mahjong etc that can help you activate your brain for a productive day. Infact, according to research conducted at Brigham Young University, coworkers can improve their productivity by 20% by playing video games for 45 minutes [Source: Playing video games can improve your office productivity]. Although online games can be extremely addictive and have gained a bad reputation because of that, in order to make it educationally beneficial for you, it is important to find the right games that are stimulating and help you learn, along with boosting your productivity.
Watching Addictive Food Videos
Whether you eat to live or live to eat, we have all been guilty of watching at least one food video. From short 30 to 80 second videos to long 10 minutes videos, we are all hooked to watching fun and appetizing videos. There is something comforting and appeasing about watching these random recipe videos. Various videos by Tasty, Tastemade, Spoon University etc have these amazing clips that make us feel like we can eat through our eyes.
There is no denying that these videos are extremely addictive and comforting. But often, you could come across some videos that offer healthy recipes that are delicious. So while these videos are fun, why not whip up a few recipes that are actually beneficial for you!
Watching DIY Videos
The funny thing about art and craft ideas is that even when you search for it on Google you mostly end up with results of DIY ideas for kids. It made me realize that either you end up pursuing a career in this field or we end up leaving art and craft behind in our childhood. Art and craft projects are extremely fun, entertaining and can even get your creative juices flowing. So why should we, as adults, leave it behind? Whether you are an amateur or a highly experienced crafter, it’s a good time to start watching DIY videos that can help you create crafts for your daily use.
Be it soap-making, or gardening or furniture-making, the internet offers a variety of videos that can help you take up a hobby or pass your time trying to make something new and exciting. Youtube even has various videos that will guide you with making anything and everything in arts and crafts, videos and infographics, or household items, from scratch.
The thing about entertainment is that associating it with education can be very difficult. They both have very different paths and goals. While education aims to impart knowledge and a sense of responsibility and growth, entertainment is purely for the purpose of amusement. Associating with the concept of “online edutainment” can become very difficult especially with so much regurgitated and ineffectual content available online.
So while the goal of education is not entertainment, and one may be associated with seriousness, and the latter with fun. There is no need to compromise on either. Learning can be fun and fun can be informational too. Choosing wisely is the key to striking a balance between the two.
