Pedagogy & Design

Motivation (Whitton, 2010)

On a personal level, I value my free time – what little time is afforded to a secondary school teacher with a young family and who is undertaking two separate course of study at postgraduate level – any of which tries to contain elements of newspaper and short story/poetry reading.  I would categorise myself as one who would need to see an educational purpose or that the completion of domestic and academic activities on the peripherary were not being undermined by spending time at a console or PC playing a game.

According to Whitton (p. 37) motivation and purpose are paramount to digital games-based learning; users need to be in control, and for games in learning, users will accept them if they are the most effective way of learning – this is the most important aspect (p. 40-41).  Games have the ability to engage but must have sound educational principles in order that the play does not obfuscate the learning outcome(s).

Achieving the necessary immersion – whereby players (learners) are fascinated and increasingly challenged – relies on the authenticity of and identification with a particular context for a user.  This leads to the experience of ‘flow’ (as defined by Csikszentmihalyi) whereupon the player enters into the optimal state of learning, and is in complete control of this experience.   But motivation is seen as a complex process.  Students’ intrinsic motivations for school decline grades 3 to 9, as a result of extrinsic motivations – grades, expectations, etc. Fun, joy, meaning, challenge have been stripped out.  So what are the differences between this traditional school-based learning and digitial games-based engagement?

Malone & Lepper developed a taxonomy of four factors in intrinsic motivators when playing games: game challenge, curiosity, control and fantasy, with ten additional factors being defined by Tuzun (2004): identity presentation, social relations, playing, learning, achievement, helping, rewards, immersion, uniqueness and creativity.

Relating to the idea of the expectations place on appropriateness of a learning activity or game, the greatest potential is in developing high-level, transferable skills: autonomy, analysis, critical evaluation and team working.  Experience, discussion and application is the constructivist approach, a theory deployed by Vygotsky.  In order to support this optimized state of ‘active learning’ constructivism suggests:

- Situated cognition
- Cognitive Puzzlement
- Social Collaboration 

and I would suggest that many digitial games – specifically designed for learning or otherwise - offer such a constructivist learning environment:  "a place where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their guided pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities."

Honebein (cited in Whitton, 2010) presents 7 pedagogic goals of the design of constructivist learning environments: 

·          Responsibility for how/what they learn
·          Multiple viewpoints
·          Ownership of learning process
·          Authentic and relevant
·          Real-life activities
·          Support social learning
·          Multiple modes of learning

Additionally, game play must be offered in conjunction with periods of structured reflection, whereby the player can reflect on the activities just taken place with a view to tuning and restructuring their schematic models for use in further play or in transferable application.

At the heart is the learner or the player – the teacher acts merely as a learning facilitator, with opportunities for communities of practice (both bodied and disembodied) delivering additional critical support.  This ‘experiential learning’ (Kolb) requires feedback being given to the user in a timely and relevant format in order for the user to check their progress.

So, digital games can support the main educational theories of learning: active learning and constructivism, experiential learning, collaborative learning and problem-based learning.  

What succeeds is academic learning disguised as contextualized with important social issues, aesthetically-rich dramatic play.