If I had to choose the most important book to read regarding how to reform our school system, I would chose, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, by James Paul Gee.
Provided below are excerpts from the book.
36 LEARNING PRINCIPLES
1. ACTIVE, CRITICAL LEARNING PRINCIPLE
All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.
2. DESIGN PRINCIPLE
Learning to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.
3. SEMIOTIC PRINCIPLE
Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems parentheses images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc. parentheses as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
Literacy requires people to be able to participate in – or at least understand – certain sorts of social practices. We need not only to focus on just codes or representations parentheses like a language, equations, images, and so forth) but the domains in which these codes are representations are used. We need to think in terms on what the author calls semiotic domains.
Semiotic here just means “signs.”
Semiotic domain can be translated into, “an area or set of activities where people think, act, and value in certain ways.”
For example, a plumber lives within a different semiotic domain van a brain surgeon. In both domains, the term “flow rate” have entirely different meanings.
When we learn a new semiotic domain in a more active way, not as passive content, three things happened:
1. We learn to experience the feel and operate on the world in new ways.
2. since semiotic domains usually are shared by groups of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices, we gained the potential to join this social group, to become affiliated with such kinds of people ( even though we may never see all of them, or any of them, face-to-face).
3. We gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in the domain and in related domains.
This is active learning. Such learning is not yet what I call critical learning. For learning to be critical as well is active, one additional feature is needed. The learner needs to learn not only how to understand and produce meanings in a particular semiotic domain but, in addition, needs to learn how to think about the domain at a Meta level as a complex system of interrelated parts.
What is a semiotic domain? Words, symbols, images, and artifacts have meetings that are specific to particular semiotic domains and particular situations.
I was a cannery worker, later I became an academic. I use the word work in both cases, but the word meant different things in each case. In my cannery life, it meant something like laboring for eight straight hours in order to survive and get home to leave my real life. In my academic life, it means something like chosen efforts I put into thinking, reading, writing, and teaching as part and parcel of my vocation, efforts not clocked by an eight hour workday.
4, SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE
Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
There are two different ways to look at semiotic domains: space internally and externally. For example, first person shooter games are a semiotic domain, and they contain a particular type of contents. Space per instance, as part of their typical content, such games involve moving through a virtual world and a first-person perspective and using weapons to battle enemies. Space of course, such games involve a good deal more content as well. Thus we can talk about the typical sorts of contents read finding first-person shooter games. This is to view the semiotic domain internally.
On the other hand, people actually play first-person shooter games as a practice in the world, sometimes alone and sometimes other people on the Internet or one that connects several game platforms or computers together. They may also talk to other players about such games and read magazines and Internet sites devoted to them. They are aware that certain people are more abducted playing such games in our others. They are also aware that people working to such games take on certain identities, at least when they are involved with those gains. For example, it is unlikely that people into first-person shooter games are going to object to violence in videogames, though they may have strong views about how that violence ought to function in games.
I will call the group of people associated with a given semiotic domain in this case first person shooter gamers an affinity group. People in an affinity group can recognize others as more or less insiders to the group. They may not see many people in the group face-to-face, but one interact with someone on the Internet or read something about the domain, they can recognize certain ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, and leaving as more or less typical of people who are into the semiotic domain.
5. METALEVEL THINKING ABOUT SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE
Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domains being learned to other semiotic domains.
6. PSYCHOSOCIAL MORATORIUM PRINCIPLE
Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.
Some subject with damaged learning (their story may be that they think they can never learn math, for example)
To repair damaged learning of any domain there must be some such story, though the stories will be as various as the learners and him and even more important, the author learned that videogames create what the psychologist Eric Erickson has called a psychosocial moratorium (Learning Principle 6) that is, a learning space in which the learner can take risks where real world consequences are the word. After all, you can save the game and start back at seaplane when he fail. Good computer games are designed so that they adjust to different levels of play every word each sort of player, the players putting in effort, with some appropriate degree of success. For example, in a shooter game, too much exploration, I may uncover a spiffy rifle I’m just thrilled with, since is so much better than the crowbar I have been using depend on enemies, all you, much better at the game tonight, and found a tank.
7. COMMITTED LEARNING PRINCIPLE
Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as an extension of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment virtual world that they find compelling.
In good science classrooms the learners real-world identities are involved all learners in a science classroom bring to that room there real-world identities. If a child brings to science learning a damaged learning identity like many children do then this identity needs to be repaired before any active critical learning can occur hearing now.
8. IDENTITY PRINCIPLE
Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on:
THREE IDENTITIES: VIRTUAL, REAL, AND PROJECTIVE
When one plays the role playing game like World of Warcraft, there are three identities: First there is a virtual identity which is one’s identity in the virtual world of World of Warcraft craft. In my case the character is the human warlock named Brothereye. This first identity is Charles Osburn as Brothereye. The successes and failures of the virtual being Brothereye are a blend of my doing and not my doing. For example I made Brothereye and him developed into higher levels but Brothereye is succeeding in a world that I did not create. So I am not responsible in a certain way for his success and failures.
A second identity that is at stake and playing World of Warcraft is a real-world identity namely my own as Charles Osburn. While playing the game, Charles Osburn is playing a character named Brothereye. As a real person I have many different non-virtual identities and anyone of my real-world identities can be reacting whenever I am playing Warcraft.
Third identity that is at stake and playing a game like World of Warcraft is what is called a projective identity. This has two meanings: project means to project one’s values and desires onto the virtual character and seeing the virtual characters as one’s own project in the making. In the projective identity I worry about what sort of person I want Brothereye to be and what type history I wanted to have had by the time I am done playing the game. Players are projecting in identity onto their virtual character based both on their values and on their own values and on what the game has taught them about what such a character should or might be and become. For example, the fact that I am careful not to have Brothereye do anything malicious or evil to others is me, Charles Osburn, projecting my values onto the character.
This tripartite play of identities (a virtual identity, a real world identity, and a projective identity) in the relationship “player as virtual character” is quite powerful. It transcends identification with characters in novels or movies, for instance. The author was proud of his character at the end of the game in a way in which he had never been proud of a character in a novel or movie, however much he identified with story character..
The theme of this book is that good videogames reflect, in their design, good principles of learning. Deep learning is described as active critical learning. People cannot learn in a deep way within a semiotic domain if they are not willing to commit themselves firmly to the learning in terms of time, effort kind and active engagement. Such a commitment requires that they are willing to see themselves in terms of a new identity, that is, to see themselves as a kind of person learn, use, and value the new semiotic domain. In turn, they need to believe that, if they are successful learners and the domain, valued and accepted by others committed to that domain – that is by people an affinity group associated with the domain.
9. SELF KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE
The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but about themselves in their current and potential capacities.
10. AMPLIFICATION OF INPUT PRINCIPLE
For a little input, learners get lots of output.
A damage learner starts with the assumption that they are a failure and learning that particular subject. But how can such repair work being done? It is no easy matter in fact, often this is what good teaching, especially in socially and culturally diverse classrooms, amounts to. Such teaching and learning is, in my review, a matter of three things:
1. The learner must be enticed to try, even if he or she already has good grounds to be afraid to try.
2. The learners must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if he or she begins with little motivation to do so.
3. The learner must achieve some meaningful success when he or she has expanded this effort.
There are three principles here because people will not put an effort if they are not even going to try; success without effort is not rewarding; and effort with little success was equally not rewarding.
Videogames are particularly good at these three things, at least for some types of learners. Videogames offer players a feeling of achievement in a number of different ways. First of all, they operate according to a very powerful learning principle, a principle we can call the amplification of input principle (Learning Principle 10). Driving a car is a good example of amplification of input you press a little paddle them off you zoon. In a videogame you press keyboards buttons and your character in the virtual world comes to life. Amplification of input is highly motivating for learning. By the way, in the real world science often operates by the amplification of the input principle. Chemistry experiment, you mix few chemicals make a major discovery, cure cancer, or blow up the lab.
11. ACHIEVEMENT PRINCIPLE
For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learners level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.
The learner must be enticed from lots of effort this is done by making the virtual world and virtual identity at stake in the learning compelling to the learner on his or her own terms. The learner needs to be sucked in.
Finally a success for effort at different levels needs to be built in letting learners know all the while that there will be yet your successes. Greater effort. Let us return to projective identities. When learners take on a projective identity, they want the scientists they are playing to be a certain sort of person and to have had a certain strip history the learning trajectory of this classroom. A good science learning, learners are not just role-playing being is because of a certain sort – there virtual identity. There also proactively building and virtual person has a certain kind of person with a certain kind of history they are strike that. They are projecting their own hopes and desires onto that person. If learners in classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magical happens. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as a real-world identity.
12. PRACTICE PRINCIPLE
Learners get lots and lots of practice and a context where the practice is not boring (I.de., in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and were the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
One thing that designers in videogames realize, but that many schools seem not to, isn’t learning for human beings is in large part need to practice what they are learning a good deal before they master it. The fact that human learning is a practice effort can create good deal of difficulty for learning in school. Children cannot learn to deploy they have no opportunities to practice what they are learning. However if practices are boring they will resist it.
Good videogames create a compelling world in which a learner has made identity commitment and sense of gauging answer play with identities we have discussed. Thanks to this fact, the player practices over and over again, relevant skills playing the game, often without realizing that he or she’s engaging in such extended practice sessions.
Educators often bemoan the fact that videogames are compelling in school not. They say that children must learn to practice skills outside of meaningful context and outside their own goals. Unfortunately, if human learning works best in a certain way given the sorts biological creatures we are, then it is not going to work well in another way just because educators policymakers and politicians wanted to.
Passive learning rather than active critical learning will not lead to much power and empowerment in the contemporary world.
13. ONGOING LEARNING PRINCIPLE
The distinction between learner and master is a vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the “regime of competence” Principle listed next, must at higher and higher levels, undo there routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, undoing automatization, and new reorganized automatization.
14. “REGIME of COMPETENCE” PRINCIPLE
the learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge, of his orders resources, so those points things are felt as challenging but not “undoable.”
15. PROBING PRINCIPLE
Learning is a cycle probing the world (doing something); reflecting in the and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; re-probing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.
16. MULTIPLE ROUTES PRINCIPLE
There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.
17. SITUATED MEETING PRINCIPLE
The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, text, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom-up the embodied experience.
18.TEXT PRINCIPLE
Text are not understood purely verbally (i.e., only in terms of the definition of the words in the text and their text internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading tech support from and bot action) comes only when learners have had enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experience with similar texts.
19 INTERTEXTUAL PRINCIPLE
The learner understands text as a family (“genre”) of related tax and understands any one such text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some text. Understanding exuberant text as a family (genre) of tax is a large part of what helps learner make sense of such texts.
20. MULTIMODAL PRINCIPLE meaning and knowledge are built up to various modalities (images, text, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.
21. “MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE” PRINCIPLE
Thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge are “stored” in tools, technologies, material objects, and the environment. This frees learners to engage her minds of other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in these tools, technologies, material objects, and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.
22. INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE
Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up and repeated practice and experience, often in association with an affinity, counts a great deal and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.
23. SUBSET PRINCIPLE
Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain.
24. INCREMENTAL PRINCIPLE
Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases.
25. CONCENTRATED SAMPLE PRINCIPLE
The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of fundamental signs and actions that would be the case in a less controlled sample. Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.
26. BOTTOM UP BASIC SKILLS PRINCIPLE
Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom-up by engaging in more and more of the game/domain or games/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.
27. EXPLICIT INFORMATION ON DEMAND and JUST IN TIME PRINCIPLE
The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just in time, with the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.
28. DISCOVERY PRINCIPLE
Over telling is To a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and bank discoveries.
29. TRANSFER PRINCIPLE
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that required Thing and transforming that earlier learning.
30. CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT WORLD PRINCIPLE
Learning set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with their own lives relate to them impervious ways.
31. CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT LEARNING PRINCIPLE
Learning set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their Denny’s, stabilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models learning it and themselves as learners.
32 CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about the cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.
33. DISTRIBUTED PRINCIPLE
Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.
34. DISPERSED PRINCIPLE
Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may really are never see face-to-face.
35. AFFINITY GROUP PRINCIPLE
Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender combination, ethnicity, or culture.
36. INSIDER PRINCIPLE
The learner is an “insider,” is encrypt teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “consumer”) able to customize the learning experience and domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience.
Provided below are excerpts from the book.
36 LEARNING PRINCIPLES
1. ACTIVE, CRITICAL LEARNING PRINCIPLE
All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.
2. DESIGN PRINCIPLE
Learning to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.
3. SEMIOTIC PRINCIPLE
Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems parentheses images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc. parentheses as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
Literacy requires people to be able to participate in – or at least understand – certain sorts of social practices. We need not only to focus on just codes or representations parentheses like a language, equations, images, and so forth) but the domains in which these codes are representations are used. We need to think in terms on what the author calls semiotic domains.
Semiotic here just means “signs.”
Semiotic domain can be translated into, “an area or set of activities where people think, act, and value in certain ways.”
For example, a plumber lives within a different semiotic domain van a brain surgeon. In both domains, the term “flow rate” have entirely different meanings.
When we learn a new semiotic domain in a more active way, not as passive content, three things happened:
1. We learn to experience the feel and operate on the world in new ways.
2. since semiotic domains usually are shared by groups of people who carry them on as distinctive social practices, we gained the potential to join this social group, to become affiliated with such kinds of people ( even though we may never see all of them, or any of them, face-to-face).
3. We gain resources that prepare us for future learning and problem solving in the domain and in related domains.
This is active learning. Such learning is not yet what I call critical learning. For learning to be critical as well is active, one additional feature is needed. The learner needs to learn not only how to understand and produce meanings in a particular semiotic domain but, in addition, needs to learn how to think about the domain at a Meta level as a complex system of interrelated parts.
What is a semiotic domain? Words, symbols, images, and artifacts have meetings that are specific to particular semiotic domains and particular situations.
I was a cannery worker, later I became an academic. I use the word work in both cases, but the word meant different things in each case. In my cannery life, it meant something like laboring for eight straight hours in order to survive and get home to leave my real life. In my academic life, it means something like chosen efforts I put into thinking, reading, writing, and teaching as part and parcel of my vocation, efforts not clocked by an eight hour workday.
4, SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE
Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
There are two different ways to look at semiotic domains: space internally and externally. For example, first person shooter games are a semiotic domain, and they contain a particular type of contents. Space per instance, as part of their typical content, such games involve moving through a virtual world and a first-person perspective and using weapons to battle enemies. Space of course, such games involve a good deal more content as well. Thus we can talk about the typical sorts of contents read finding first-person shooter games. This is to view the semiotic domain internally.
On the other hand, people actually play first-person shooter games as a practice in the world, sometimes alone and sometimes other people on the Internet or one that connects several game platforms or computers together. They may also talk to other players about such games and read magazines and Internet sites devoted to them. They are aware that certain people are more abducted playing such games in our others. They are also aware that people working to such games take on certain identities, at least when they are involved with those gains. For example, it is unlikely that people into first-person shooter games are going to object to violence in videogames, though they may have strong views about how that violence ought to function in games.
I will call the group of people associated with a given semiotic domain in this case first person shooter gamers an affinity group. People in an affinity group can recognize others as more or less insiders to the group. They may not see many people in the group face-to-face, but one interact with someone on the Internet or read something about the domain, they can recognize certain ways of thinking, acting, interacting, valuing, and leaving as more or less typical of people who are into the semiotic domain.
5. METALEVEL THINKING ABOUT SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE
Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationships of the semiotic domains being learned to other semiotic domains.
6. PSYCHOSOCIAL MORATORIUM PRINCIPLE
Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.
Some subject with damaged learning (their story may be that they think they can never learn math, for example)
To repair damaged learning of any domain there must be some such story, though the stories will be as various as the learners and him and even more important, the author learned that videogames create what the psychologist Eric Erickson has called a psychosocial moratorium (Learning Principle 6) that is, a learning space in which the learner can take risks where real world consequences are the word. After all, you can save the game and start back at seaplane when he fail. Good computer games are designed so that they adjust to different levels of play every word each sort of player, the players putting in effort, with some appropriate degree of success. For example, in a shooter game, too much exploration, I may uncover a spiffy rifle I’m just thrilled with, since is so much better than the crowbar I have been using depend on enemies, all you, much better at the game tonight, and found a tank.
7. COMMITTED LEARNING PRINCIPLE
Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as an extension of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment virtual world that they find compelling.
In good science classrooms the learners real-world identities are involved all learners in a science classroom bring to that room there real-world identities. If a child brings to science learning a damaged learning identity like many children do then this identity needs to be repaired before any active critical learning can occur hearing now.
8. IDENTITY PRINCIPLE
Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on:
THREE IDENTITIES: VIRTUAL, REAL, AND PROJECTIVE
When one plays the role playing game like World of Warcraft, there are three identities: First there is a virtual identity which is one’s identity in the virtual world of World of Warcraft craft. In my case the character is the human warlock named Brothereye. This first identity is Charles Osburn as Brothereye. The successes and failures of the virtual being Brothereye are a blend of my doing and not my doing. For example I made Brothereye and him developed into higher levels but Brothereye is succeeding in a world that I did not create. So I am not responsible in a certain way for his success and failures.
A second identity that is at stake and playing World of Warcraft is a real-world identity namely my own as Charles Osburn. While playing the game, Charles Osburn is playing a character named Brothereye. As a real person I have many different non-virtual identities and anyone of my real-world identities can be reacting whenever I am playing Warcraft.
Third identity that is at stake and playing a game like World of Warcraft is what is called a projective identity. This has two meanings: project means to project one’s values and desires onto the virtual character and seeing the virtual characters as one’s own project in the making. In the projective identity I worry about what sort of person I want Brothereye to be and what type history I wanted to have had by the time I am done playing the game. Players are projecting in identity onto their virtual character based both on their values and on their own values and on what the game has taught them about what such a character should or might be and become. For example, the fact that I am careful not to have Brothereye do anything malicious or evil to others is me, Charles Osburn, projecting my values onto the character.
This tripartite play of identities (a virtual identity, a real world identity, and a projective identity) in the relationship “player as virtual character” is quite powerful. It transcends identification with characters in novels or movies, for instance. The author was proud of his character at the end of the game in a way in which he had never been proud of a character in a novel or movie, however much he identified with story character..
The theme of this book is that good videogames reflect, in their design, good principles of learning. Deep learning is described as active critical learning. People cannot learn in a deep way within a semiotic domain if they are not willing to commit themselves firmly to the learning in terms of time, effort kind and active engagement. Such a commitment requires that they are willing to see themselves in terms of a new identity, that is, to see themselves as a kind of person learn, use, and value the new semiotic domain. In turn, they need to believe that, if they are successful learners and the domain, valued and accepted by others committed to that domain – that is by people an affinity group associated with the domain.
9. SELF KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE
The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but about themselves in their current and potential capacities.
10. AMPLIFICATION OF INPUT PRINCIPLE
For a little input, learners get lots of output.
A damage learner starts with the assumption that they are a failure and learning that particular subject. But how can such repair work being done? It is no easy matter in fact, often this is what good teaching, especially in socially and culturally diverse classrooms, amounts to. Such teaching and learning is, in my review, a matter of three things:
1. The learner must be enticed to try, even if he or she already has good grounds to be afraid to try.
2. The learners must be enticed to put in lots of effort even if he or she begins with little motivation to do so.
3. The learner must achieve some meaningful success when he or she has expanded this effort.
There are three principles here because people will not put an effort if they are not even going to try; success without effort is not rewarding; and effort with little success was equally not rewarding.
Videogames are particularly good at these three things, at least for some types of learners. Videogames offer players a feeling of achievement in a number of different ways. First of all, they operate according to a very powerful learning principle, a principle we can call the amplification of input principle (Learning Principle 10). Driving a car is a good example of amplification of input you press a little paddle them off you zoon. In a videogame you press keyboards buttons and your character in the virtual world comes to life. Amplification of input is highly motivating for learning. By the way, in the real world science often operates by the amplification of the input principle. Chemistry experiment, you mix few chemicals make a major discovery, cure cancer, or blow up the lab.
11. ACHIEVEMENT PRINCIPLE
For learners of all levels of skill there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customized to each learners level, effort, and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.
The learner must be enticed from lots of effort this is done by making the virtual world and virtual identity at stake in the learning compelling to the learner on his or her own terms. The learner needs to be sucked in.
Finally a success for effort at different levels needs to be built in letting learners know all the while that there will be yet your successes. Greater effort. Let us return to projective identities. When learners take on a projective identity, they want the scientists they are playing to be a certain sort of person and to have had a certain strip history the learning trajectory of this classroom. A good science learning, learners are not just role-playing being is because of a certain sort – there virtual identity. There also proactively building and virtual person has a certain kind of person with a certain kind of history they are strike that. They are projecting their own hopes and desires onto that person. If learners in classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magical happens. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as a real-world identity.
12. PRACTICE PRINCIPLE
Learners get lots and lots of practice and a context where the practice is not boring (I.de., in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and were the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
One thing that designers in videogames realize, but that many schools seem not to, isn’t learning for human beings is in large part need to practice what they are learning a good deal before they master it. The fact that human learning is a practice effort can create good deal of difficulty for learning in school. Children cannot learn to deploy they have no opportunities to practice what they are learning. However if practices are boring they will resist it.
Good videogames create a compelling world in which a learner has made identity commitment and sense of gauging answer play with identities we have discussed. Thanks to this fact, the player practices over and over again, relevant skills playing the game, often without realizing that he or she’s engaging in such extended practice sessions.
Educators often bemoan the fact that videogames are compelling in school not. They say that children must learn to practice skills outside of meaningful context and outside their own goals. Unfortunately, if human learning works best in a certain way given the sorts biological creatures we are, then it is not going to work well in another way just because educators policymakers and politicians wanted to.
Passive learning rather than active critical learning will not lead to much power and empowerment in the contemporary world.
13. ONGOING LEARNING PRINCIPLE
The distinction between learner and master is a vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the “regime of competence” Principle listed next, must at higher and higher levels, undo there routinized mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automatization, undoing automatization, and new reorganized automatization.
14. “REGIME of COMPETENCE” PRINCIPLE
the learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge, of his orders resources, so those points things are felt as challenging but not “undoable.”
15. PROBING PRINCIPLE
Learning is a cycle probing the world (doing something); reflecting in the and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; re-probing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.
16. MULTIPLE ROUTES PRINCIPLE
There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.
17. SITUATED MEETING PRINCIPLE
The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artifacts, symbols, text, etc.) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualized. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom-up the embodied experience.
18.TEXT PRINCIPLE
Text are not understood purely verbally (i.e., only in terms of the definition of the words in the text and their text internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading tech support from and bot action) comes only when learners have had enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experience with similar texts.
19 INTERTEXTUAL PRINCIPLE
The learner understands text as a family (“genre”) of related tax and understands any one such text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some text. Understanding exuberant text as a family (genre) of tax is a large part of what helps learner make sense of such texts.
20. MULTIMODAL PRINCIPLE meaning and knowledge are built up to various modalities (images, text, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc.), not just words.
21. “MATERIAL INTELLIGENCE” PRINCIPLE
Thinking, problem-solving, and knowledge are “stored” in tools, technologies, material objects, and the environment. This frees learners to engage her minds of other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in these tools, technologies, material objects, and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.
22. INTUITIVE KNOWLEDGE PRINCIPLE
Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up and repeated practice and experience, often in association with an affinity, counts a great deal and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.
23. SUBSET PRINCIPLE
Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain.
24. INCREMENTAL PRINCIPLE
Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalizations that are fruitful for later cases.
25. CONCENTRATED SAMPLE PRINCIPLE
The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of fundamental signs and actions that would be the case in a less controlled sample. Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.
26. BOTTOM UP BASIC SKILLS PRINCIPLE
Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context; rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom-up by engaging in more and more of the game/domain or games/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.
27. EXPLICIT INFORMATION ON DEMAND and JUST IN TIME PRINCIPLE
The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just in time, with the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.
28. DISCOVERY PRINCIPLE
Over telling is To a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and bank discoveries.
29. TRANSFER PRINCIPLE
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that required Thing and transforming that earlier learning.
30. CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT WORLD PRINCIPLE
Learning set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with their own lives relate to them impervious ways.
31. CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT LEARNING PRINCIPLE
Learning set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their Denny’s, stabilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models learning it and themselves as learners.
32 CULTURAL MODELS ABOUT SEMIOTIC DOMAINS PRINCIPLE
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about the cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.
33. DISTRIBUTED PRINCIPLE
Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.
34. DISPERSED PRINCIPLE
Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may really are never see face-to-face.
35. AFFINITY GROUP PRINCIPLE
Learners constitute an “affinity group,” that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender combination, ethnicity, or culture.
36. INSIDER PRINCIPLE
The learner is an “insider,” is encrypt teacher,” and “producer” (not just a “consumer”) able to customize the learning experience and domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience.