The Case for the Gamified Classroom

Gamified instruction empowers students to own their learning. Students who learn in a gamified classroom have a better capacity for persistence. Gamified instruction helps students develop a capacity for selfdirection. Gamified classrooms impart critical social skills. Gamification of learning enables students to build and sustain learning communities. Gamified instruction is inherently democratic and meritocratic and hence encourages risk taking. Gamified instruction helps students maintain ...

 Busyness Correlated with Improved Cognitive Performance

Sustained engagement in mentally challenging activities has been shown to improve memory in older adults. We hypothesized that a busy schedule would be a proxy for an engaged lifestyle and would facilitate cognition. Here, we examined the relationship between busyness and cognition in adults aged 50–89. Participants (N = 330) from the Dallas Lifespan Brain Study (DLBS) completed a cognitive battery and the Martin and Park Environmental Demands Questionnaire (MPED), an assessment of busyness...

 WHERETO Mnemonic for Lessons

Learning Activities: What learning experiences and instruction will enable students to achieve the desired results? How will the design W = Help the students know Where the unit is going and What is expected? Help the teacher know Where the students are coming from (prior knowledge, interests)? H = Hook all students and Hold their interest? E = Equip students, help them Experience the key ideas and Explore the issues? R = Provide opportunities to Rethink and Revise their understandings...

 The Nintendo Effect

Technology can play an important role, but we haven’t had the time or wherewithal to explore it fully. I’m waiting for a breakthrough process, which I think may happen in mathematics. The people at Nintendo figured out billions of dollars ago that you pull kids in, you get them engaged, and that’s the model: engagement of intensive focused effort. The result is rapid incremental development of new skills and capabilities. These kids operate at a speed and accuracy level unheard of outsi...

 PERMA: Five Elements for Well-Being.

Well-being is about what individuals and societies choose for its own sake, that which is north of indifference. The elements of well-being must be exclusive, measurable independently of one another, and—ideally—exhaustive. I believe there are five such elements, and they have a handy acronym, PERMA: P   Positive Emotion E   Engagement R   Positive Relationships M   Meaning and Purpose A   Accomplishment

 Video Games Improve Attention

When we want to engage, believe me, we can. And not only will we then make fewer mistakes of perception, but we will become the types of focused, observant people that we may have thought we were incapable of becoming. Even children who have been diagnosed with ADHD can find themselves able to focus on certain things that grab them, that activate and engage their minds. Like video games. Time after time, video games have proven able to bring out the attentional resources in people that they n...

 We Have Finite Time to Spend in Life

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt's creator, discussed the notion of "time until death." All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can't spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game's cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time. Value...

 Imaginative Play with Rules

Vygotsky was one of the few researchers of his era to study dramatic play in children. He predicted that the ability of the under-5 crowd to engage in imaginative activities was going to be a better gauge of academic success than any other activity—including quantitative and verbal competencies. The reason, Vygotsky believed, was that such engagement allowed children to learn how to regulate their social behaviors. Hardly the carefree activity we think of in the United States, Vygotsky sa...