Metagame

Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai...

 Considering Art Creative but Engineering Not as a Questio...

In retrospect, Cohen and MacKeith made a number of questionable assumptions that undermine that conclusion. To be fair, these assumptions were quite common among psychologists at the time and still persist to a significant degree among the public. One of these assumptions is that some activities, such as the arts, are inherently creative, whereas others, such as science or engineering, are not. Another assumption is that creativity is a function of one's ability to fantasize, which is to say,...

 Category Practice

Students appear to use a different kind of thinking when they create original patterns following rules they create (Grabowski, Damasio, & Damasio, 1998). Activities that engage students in building categories can start as early as preschool. Building category practice can be done with a bag of mixed buttons. After first modeling the procedure, you can have students work on their own or in pairs to sketch the categories they discover. Th is would also work as a language arts learning cente...

 Flow Promotes Learning

Experiences that are well aligned with flow are those that we have no trouble committing to for a long time. We concentrate on them for hours at a time because we’re getting rewarded for that concentration. Even more important, perhaps, is that when we’re playing games, we want to enter that deep state of concentration. Well-crafted experiences offer a deep and effortless involvement that separates the experience of play from the experience of ordinary life. These experiences are enjoyabl...

 Hacking is Playful

Also central to the Hacker Ethic is playfulness. At a 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny wrote, “Hacking is a playful act. In a primal sense, play is the investigation and experimentation with borders and combinations” (O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, website). Despite early, highly structured approaches to computing in mainframe laboratories in the mid-twentieth century, a computing culture of iterative experimental hacking has evolved th...

 Mindfulness to Teach Students How to Pay Attention

"One of the primary ironies of modern education is that we ask students to 'pay attention' dozens of times a day, yet we never teach them how," Amy Saltzman elucidates in PBS's Mindfulness: A Teacher's Guide. "The practice of mindfulness teaches students how to pay attention, and this way of paying attention enhances both academic and social-emotional learning." [...] Mindful Schools recommends starting with a simple practice like mindful listening, where students sit in silence and notice ...

 Children of the Code

None of us like to engage in activities that cause us to feel ashamed of ourselves. So what happens to children who feel ashamed of themselves when learning to read? They are in serious danger. The shame they feel not only motivates them to avoid reading, it also fosters self-dis-esteem and undermines the cognitive capacities they need to learn to read in the first place. Millions of children are caught in this learning-disabling downward spiral. Not only are they in danger of being poor re...

 Four kinds of intrinsic rewards

First and foremost, we crave satisfying work, every single day. The exact nature of this “satisfying work” is different from person to person, but for everyone it means being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts. Second, we crave the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful. We want to feel powerful in our own lives and show off to others what we’re good at. We want to be optimistic about our own chances fo...

 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...

 Our Works Live On Beyond Us

A few of the results of my activities as a scientist have become embedded in the very texture of the science I tried to serve—this is the immortality that every scientist hopes for. I have enjoyed the privilege, as a university teacher, of being in a position to influence the thought of many hundreds of young people and in them and in their lives I shall continue to live vicariously for a while. All the things I care for will continue for they will be served by those who come after me. I fi...