This is key.
Big Fat Phoenix: The most important game design lesson I ever learned.
The action that your player performs most frequently should feel like fun all by itself.
Far FAR too often, the action that the player performs most often in an educational game is clicking on buttons or closing dialog boxes.
I have long thought that “talent” is something people are born with – they may have more or less, but without enough of it, no amount of training can help someone become great at something. W/o “natural” musical talent someone can study an instrument and become good, but never great.
The same is true for teaching, and what worries me about this move away from structured education is that it requires teachers with actual teaching talent in order to succeed. I know many extraordinary teachers, but I also know many mediocre ones, and I worry what can happen when they are asked to abandon the “traditional teaching methods”.
In many ways, the traditional structure of formal education provides a framework within which uninspired, untalented, and novice teachers can work effectively. It’s kind of like the ideas behind software engineering. Software engineering is “programming for those who cannot.” (Quote from Edsger Dijkstra). Structured teaching works adequately in the hands of those who have little talent for teaching.
Now, some novice teachers can move beyond the structure and ultimately become superb teachers – we all probably know a few of these. But note: we all probably know only a few of all the teachers who stood in front of our classrooms.
Now think of your more average and your uninspired or even lousy teachers and imagine what would happen to the kids in their classes if those teachers are forced to adopt a “discovery learning” model. Yikes!
Perhaps even worse, teaching teachers how to do discovery learning requires Education faculty who are also talented – and I fear the percentage of extraordinary Ed faculty is considerably smaller than the percentage of extraordinary teachers.
Discovery learning is the educational equivalent of improv (or jazz) …. not everyone can do that.
How a High School Teacher Is ‘Gamifying’ World News
“A new game called Fantasy Geopolitics (think Fantasy Football meets Model United Nations) is radically changing the way high school students in Minnesota are interacting with the news.
In 2009, Eric Nelson, a Social Studies teacher at North Lakes Academy Charter School in Forest Lake, Minn., developed Fantasy Geopolitics after recognizing that his attempts at getting his students to engage with the class weren’t quite hitting the mark.”
Human Factors: The Third Wave of Gamification?.
This article points to another describing a “third wave” of gamification that involves effectively users creating their own games within the environment they are using, and expresses some dubiousness about its utility.
I am dubious too.
The number of people who actually want to create their own systems is (very) small compared to those who would be OK with using one.
Just look at how many people can program compared to how many people use programs.
One of the first and most important rules of application design (and a gamified system is an application) is that
NOBODY WANTS TO LEARN YOUR APPLICATION – They just want to get their work done.
Forgive the yelling, but I’ve been teaching computer science for 30+ years and it seems to be one of the hardest things to get software developers to accept.
Something many of the “pushers” of gamification as marketing voodoo magic fail to get is that people play games for entertainment. They play by choice. As soon as you make a game or gamify something that they HAVE to do (like work or formal education), things change. Now, that’s not to say that games and gamification are not worthwhile – I feel very strongly that they are – but there is a big difference between designing something fun so people will do it willingly, and making something they have to do more enjoyable or engaging (and if you want more effective, that’s a whole other challenge).
Even though I’m a pretty good programmer and can build my own websites, courses, games, and other systems, I DO NOT want to have to build my own gamification for some task I have to do. Customization is all well and good, but taken too far it becomes counter-productive.
EXCELLENT advice.
Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code — Learning to Code — Medium.
100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!) | TED Blog
“100 Websites You Should Know and Use (updated!)
Posted by: Jessica Gross
August 3, 2007 at 12:00 pm EST
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In the spring of 2007, Julius Wiedemann, editor in charge at Taschen GmbH, gave a legendary TED University talk: an ultra-fast-moving ride through the “100 websites you should know and use.” Six years later, it remains one of the most viewed TED blog posts ever. Time for an update? We think so. Below, the 2013 edition of the 100 websites to put on your radar and in your browser.
To see the original list, click here. While most of these sites are still going strong and remain wonderful resources, we’ve crossed out any that are no longer functioning. And because there are so many amazing resources out there, please add your own ideas in the comments. Happy surfing!”
Hmmmmm – helping kids learn how to think is more effective than telling them what to think. Who’d a thunk it?
Media literacy tops traditional education in school smoking-prevention efforts – Medical News Today.
A handy list. Many/most of these can apply to instructional design too.
Rapid Game Prototyping: Tips for Programmers | devmag.org.za.
