FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Isn't game-based learning frivolous?

If you learned a country's capital while chasing Carmen Sandiego, or an important date while playing Trivial Pursuit, or a fact while watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or an interesting lesson from making a wrong move in Sim City, does that change the nature of what you learned? Study after study shows that people learn better when they are relaxed and having fun. Good teachers throughout the ages have known this and used fun, play and games as part of their repertoire to increase attention and retention.. It is possible through well-designed games to teach not only facts, but judgment, reasoning, behavior, skills, safety, morals, ethics, etc. The key is to combine the engagement power of games with the content we want people to know at the end - designing games which are fun, but unlike many commercial consumer games, not frivolous.

A number of people have said to me (some quite angrily) that differences between people that we have recently referred to as "learning styles" or different "intelligences" are more important than differences between the "Digital Immigrant" and the "Digital Native " generations. I strongly disagree. No thinking person that I have talked to maintains seriously that his or her children are not enormously different from them in the ways they think and learn. .

For some reason - maybe because they are "adults" or work in the same firm, or do the same jobs -- many older people have a hard time realizing or admitting that their younger colleagues are more like their children then like themselves. But they are. While the chasm grows wider every year and is more recognizable and obvious in the 3-year-old who uses the mouse to access kids' games on his or her own on the internet, the differences have been in place and building ever since computers. computer games, and other new technologies came on the scene. It is these differences, more than anything else, that lie at the root of our obvious teaching and training problems today, because teachers and trainers are essentially from a different world, and speak a different language from their Digital Native students - with a non-digital, immigrant "accent" that their students to a great extent find unbearably old fashioned and boring.

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