Wargaming Allows a Safe Space to Learn and Experiment

Such is the power of wargames: They create a virtual world players can experience, learn from, and integrate into their tactical and strategic decision making. Let's repeat what we said at the outset. If you had the opportunity to probe the future, make strategic choices, and view the consequences of those choices in a risk-free environment before making expensive and irrevocable decisions. wouldn't you take advantage of it?

 The problem with testing for abstraction

...students learn by doing. Testing for abstraction on an exam can’t be the only way we’re evaluating student learning. If I had taken an exam on leadership in World of Warcraft, I would have likely failed, because the way I was engaged was through the practice of performing the leadership, not by talking or quizzing on it. Thought leader within the game-based learning movement, James Paul Gee, refers to this type of learning as “Situated and Embodied Learning,” where the learning is ...

 Scientists and Babies Belong Together

Scientists and children belong together in another way. The new research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined. They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments. Scientists and children belong together because they are the best learners in the universe. And that means that ordinary adults also have more powerful learning abilities than we might have thought. Grown-ups, after all, ...

 Overcoming Fear

Overcoming fear requires you to train yourself to think every time you feel fear, rather than just reacting instinctively. The thought process I go through goes like this: I'm scared. Is it physical danger? No. Well, when I make a decision based on fear, it's often a bad one, so I'm going to put the fear aside and ask myself "What is my purpose in this situation?" I'll make my decision consciously based on what helps achieve my purpose better, rather than unconsciously on my instinctive des...

 Attention is the Fundamental Literacy

Attention is the fundamental literacy. Every second I spend online, I make decisions about where to spend my attention. Should I devote any mindshare at all to this comment or that headline? — a question I need to answer each time an attractive link catches my eye. Simply becoming aware of the fact that life online requires this kind of decision-making was my first step in learning to tune a fundamental filter on what I allow into my head — a filter that is under my control only if I prac...

 Science is Patient Observation

I think it is very important--at least it was to me--that if you are going to teach people to make observations, you should show that something wonderful can come from them. I learned then what science was about. It was patience. If you looked, and you watched, and you paid attention, you got a great reward from it (although possible not every time). As a result, when I became a more mature man, I would painstakingly, hour after hour, for years, work on problems--sometimes many years, sometim...