(Cross-posted from my personal blog, Think Twice. Please forgive the impersonal style, as if I'm not writing for those of you here on Science Gaming Brain Storm.)
My current scholarly "thing" is thinking about what we can learn about teaching, especially teaching physics, from the phenomenal power of video games to motivate, captivate, and teach. The impetus to ponder this comes from wishing that students would bring the kind of hard work, determination, creativity, resourcefulness, and collaboration to learning physics that they bring to playing, say, World of Warcraft. (For a blockbuster introduction to the topic, read James Paul Gee's book
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy.)
At the moment I'm more interested in lessons we can learn from video game design and take into more traditional, classroom-based instruction than I am in creating an actual video game that teaches physics. (The latter, however, is also a fascinating challenge to contemplate.)
In that vein, a definition by Bernard Suits (quoted in Jane McGonigal's excellent book
Reality is Broken) caught my attention:
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (p.22)
The key word here is "voluntary". McGonigal makes a case that if it isn't voluntary, it isn't a game, and many of the remarkable phenomena associated with game-playing disappear. The entire psychology changes.
Yes, attending university is in principle a voluntary choice, as is one's major; but beyond that, we pretty much tell students what courses they must take and what they must do along the way to succeed, and keep them in line with grades and transcripts. Does that doom any attempt to make learning more deeply game-like?
What I'm getting at is that the very structure of our educational system frames learning activity as an externally-motivated, externally-directed, authority-laden series of tasks and assessments. I'm concerned that trying to embed a novel learning micro-environment -- say, a gaming-inspired self-paced learning activity -- into such a matrix could be doomed to failure, not because of the micro-environment's worth but because of drastic dissonance with the matrix.
If I'm even more ambitious and try to construct an entire course as something analogous to a game, I still have to assign a grade at the end, and students know it.
Those of us who would like to experiment with gaming-inspired alternative paradigms and challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about what instruction should look like, and who don't have the luxury of creating an entire parallel educational system to do our testing in, need to worry about such things.
