"am ... learned a lot about phonics that year by trying to decipher surnames on baseball cards, and a lot about cities, states, heights, weights, places of birth, stage of life. Baseball cards opened the door to baseball books, shelves and shelves of encyclopedias, magazines, histories, biographies, novels, books of jokes, anecdotes, cartoons and even poems. Literacy began for Sam with the newly pronounceable names on the picture cards and brought him what has been easily the broadest, most varied, most rewarding, and most integrated experience of his 13-year life.?(1991, p. 33-34)
This playful activity, besides demanding certain skills and practices that had clear academic payoffs, helped Sam develop a sense of himself as a learner. He learned the meaning of expertise, of knowing about something well enough that you can start a conversation with a stranger and feel sure of holding your own?(Pratt, 1991, p. 34). In other words, the baseball cards did for Sam what existing school materials often fail to do: They not only motivated him to develop basic competencies, but also enabled and enticed him to enter ever more specialized domains of knowledge.
Current literature on games, play, and learning reaffirms Pratt's observation. For example, Gee (2004) compares the complexity of what kids learn by playing Pokemon with the much more restricted vocabulary we ask them to master at school. The difference in performance reflects the higher degree of personal and social investment that kids have in learning about Pokemon. Kids learn vocabulary in Pokemon by putting it into action as they immediately transform abstract concepts and classification into elements in the game. They are motivated to master this content because they are actually engaging in something they want to do ---- an activity that their peer culture values.
Papert (1998) uses the term "ard fun"to describe the educationally compelling and valuable quality of the best commercial games. Papert asks, Did you ever hear a game advertised as being easy??He urges us to consider why young people find difficult schoolwork merely frustrating. At their best, games put kids in charge of their own learning and, at the same time, make them conscious of the learning process itself by presenting challenges they need to work through or around.
As one of the founders of the Education Arcade, a research collaborative started at MIT thatseeks to explore and promote the pedagogical potential of computer and video games, I have spent the last few years reviewing research on games and learning and building prototypes for the educational use of existing commercial games. Here are some of the things we have learned about the kinds of intrinsic motivations for learning built into games:
Games lower the threat of failure. In school, students often face considerable anxiety and sometimes harsh penalties if they make mistakes. In games, the best way to learn is to plunge in, make mistakes, lose your life, and then reboot so you can try again. Thus, games encourage exploration and experimentation. They do not give us answers that they ask us to memorize; instead, they ask us to make our own discoveries and then apply what we learn to new contexts.
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