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...

 Games Use Constant Feedback

Moreover, games use systems of points, scores, leaderboards, achievement walls, and other clever mechanisms to reinforce how well you are playing (or not playing). Feedback should force us to face reality and redirect our efforts where they are needed. Regular, systemic feedback is a rarity in the traditional school; it is, however, de rigueur in even the most poorly designed game. It is this regular, rapid feedback that not only stimulates persistence and self-direction but also gets people ...

 Stanford d.school Design Thinking Process

Step 1: Empathy = Really get to know your user Use human-centered design process, which puts the user squarely at the center of the process. When designing, you start with identifying who you want to design for (your user) and really get to know them. 3 ways to get to know our user: Observation (what we observe them doing, in the environment we want to design for as well as in other similar and different environments, so we really get to know how they live and work, what they value, etc., ...

 A good game keeps you at the edge of your ability

As you successfully lock in Tetris puzzle pieces, you get three kinds of feedback: visual—you can see row after row of pieces disappearing with a satisfying poof; quantitative—a prominently displayed score constantly ticks upward; and qualitative—you experience a steady increase in how challenging the game feels. This variety and intensity of feedback is the most important difference between digital and nondigital games. In computer and video games, the interactive loop is satisfyingly...

 Characteristics of a Game

When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation throughout the game. The goal provides players with a sense of purpose. The rules place limitations on how players can achieve the goal. By removing or limiting the obvious ways...

 Life Reduced to Bad Physics

Those reductionists who try to reduce life to physics usually try to reduce it to primitive physics—not to good physics. Good physics is broad enough to contain life, to encompass life in its description since good physics allows a vast field of possible descriptions. There is no reason why living beings should be compared to primitive machines which don't make use of feedback.

 The Child Learner as Epistemologist

IN MOST contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child. In the LOGO environment the relationship is reversed: The child, even at preschool ages, is in control: The child programs the computer. And in teaching the computer how to think, children embark on an...