Dr James Paul Gee, the Grandaddy of Game-based Learning, Explains Why Videogames Can Be Great for Learning….

If you don’t have time right now to watch this, here is a summary.

Dr Gee lists 13 Principles of why and how games help learning, grouping them into 3 areas: Empowered Learners. Problem Solving and Understanding.

1. Co-Design: Good learning requires that learners feel like active agents not just passive recipients. In a video game, players make things happen. Co-design means ownership, buy in, engaged participation. It is a key part of motivation.
2. Customise: Different styles of learning work better for different people. People cannot be agents of their own learning if they cannot make decisions about how their learning will work. Good games do this.
3. Identity: Deep learning requires an extended commitment, and such a commitment is powerfully recruited when people take on a new identity they value. Good games offer players identities that trigger a deep investment on the part of the player.
4. Manipulation: Cognitive research suggests that for humans, perception and action are deeply interconnected, e.g. when a person is manipulating a robot at a distance or watering a garden via a webcam, they cause us to feel as if our bodies and minds have stretched into a new space. Video games inherently do this. The more and better a player can manipulate a character, the more the player invests.
5. Problem Solving: Learners need to encounter well-ordered problems so that hypotheses formed early on can be applied to harder, more complex challenges. Problems in good games are designed to lead players to form good guesses about how to proceed when they face harder problems later in the game.
6. Pleasantly Frustrating: Learning works best when new challenges are pleasantly frustrating. The challenges feel hard but ‘doable’. It’s better when players can see, even when they fail, how and if they are making progress. Games adjust challenges and give feedback in such a way.
7. Cycles of Expertise: Expertise is formed by repeated cycles of practicing skills until they are nearly automatic. Once mastered, a new, more challenging goal is set. Games create and support this cycle of expertise, with cycles of extended practice, tests of mastery, then a new challenge, and new extended practice is introduced.
8. Information on Demand and ‘Just in Time’: We are quite poor at using words when given lots of them out of context and before we can see how they apply in actual situations. Verbal information is best when given ‘just in time’ (when it can put it to use) and ‘on demand’ (when we feel we need it). Games do this and show players how the information applies in action and in practice.
9. Fish Tanks: “Fish tanks” are good for learning. They are simplified systems that stress a few key variables and their interactions, enabling learners to see some basic relationships at work e.g. we begin to know what to pay attention to, before taking the steps towards eventual mastery of the more complex, real system
10. Sandboxes: “Sandboxes” allow learners to experience a situation that feels like the real thing, but with the risks and dangers greatly mitigated. Games can create sandboxes, making the player feel competent when they are not (‘performance before competence’), thereafter preventing a sense of failure that kills joy, risk taking, hypothesizing, and learning. Players do fail, of course; they die and try again, but in a way that makes failure part of the fun and central to the learning.
11. Skills as Strategies: People learn and practice skills best when they see a set of related skills as a strategy to accomplish goals they want to accomplish. This is what happens in good games.
12. System Thinking: People learn skills, strategies, and ideas best when they see how they fit into an overall larger system. In fact, any experience is enhanced when we understand how it fits into a larger meaningful whole. Good games do this.
13. Meaning as Action Image: Humans don’t usually think through general definitions and logical principles. We tend to think through experiences we have had and imaginative reconstructions of experience. For us, words and concepts have their deepest meanings when they are clearly tied to perception and action in the world. This is the heart and soul of a video game.

Reference: Learning by Design: Good video games as learning machines

 Article in E-Learning and Digital Media · March 2005, Dr James Paul Gee