Video Games for Learning
Course
Games Improve Our Perseverance [6:09]
There's a reason why we try hard over and over in video games and build up perseverance. It's because that end goal is worth it.
Games improve our ability to persevere. Of course, we have to talk about incentives when we talk about perseverance, right? I brought up about tying a bow tie. That bow tie is actually related to a reading celebration we're going to have for a book that's releasing. Many of us are donning bow ties in order to celebrate the release of this book. So I had an incentive. I wanted to make sure that I could indeed tie this bow tie so that I could be part of that celebration.
There's a reason why we try hard over and over in video games and build up that perseverance. It's because that end goal is worth it. It's like the Matrix, only it happens all the time when you're working for perseverance. In The Matrix, in the end, Neo, the main character, sort of was able to see all of the code in all of the world. It all made sense. But getting up to it, was hard and he faced defeat all the time. In the end though, he sort of realized that he was seeing it all the time and he was able to act naturally beyond that.
That's what happens in video games too. When you're able to accomplish the task, you realize, "This is how I do it." You're able to do it all the many more times beyond that because you've mastered that skill. Do we allow enough time in our class for our students to persevere toward mastery? You could even ask, are they given learning opportunities that make them want to persevere? Where is that incentive for them? Where are we providing learning opportunities with content relevant to their interests, but also important to our learning standards that causes them to have that drive to want to accomplish?
To want to achieve in places where they may not have achieved before, or in tasks that they might have never done before, so they never knew that they could achieve it. The ability to persevere also requires quick resets. By resets, I mean the opportunity to try again without a devastating feeling of failure. Failure comes as second nature in playing video games. It's something we have to do all the time in order to accomplish our goal.
Unfortunately, in education currently, we don't have such a loving relationship with failure. We have a relationship that's more like pass or failure. That either/or is not such a good thing. Providing a learning environment where our students can have quick resets so that we're all able to retry with little or no recourse, so that that payoff can be worthwhile. That's the place we want to get to.
When students are working and trying and testing out new ways to approach the concept, without even thinking about the time that's going by or the number of times that they're trying things out, they enter a place we call flow state. Perhaps, you've heard of flow state before. It's that place where it feels like time is slowing down where you're thinking five steps ahead, where you're not needing to worry about the controls. Your fingers in the video game are reacting subconsciously. It's the Matrix where you don't have to think what's going on. It just happens.
We can't live in a flow state, but you always are seeking that in video games. I'm trying to not have to think about making this jump or hitting this goal or reaching this target. I want to concentrate on just getting through the task at hand, but not having to worry so much about much of the mechanics. Imagine what it would be like to have that in our classrooms too, that we're able to let students work so much on given tasks that they can build mastery of them, so that they don't need to think as much about the process, but rather, on the product that they're producing.
Taking what we've just discussed about perseverance in games, let's consider what this could look like in your library. There's a great video game called Elegy for a Dead World and in this game, the person playing it is sent to a distant planet where we learn that all of civilization on that planet has been wiped out. And your job, as the game player, as sort of the game designer in this way, is to recount the story of this past civilization. You do that by writing it down.
Now on the surface, we're recording a new history for this dead world. But what's really going on here is that we're building up writing endurance. When else do we have the opportunity to want to write and write and write and not worry about word count, but worry about telling a story and capturing something authentic? This also happens or has happened in my library when we participated in a Rube Goldberg contest in our county in which our students had to use simple machines and design a series of simple machines impacting one another, in order to perform a meaningful, or maybe meaningless, task.
In this case, it was watering a plant. But using those simple machines and understanding them and having to set them up over and over and over, gives students that acquired knowledge of already knowing simple machines secondhand and they could persevere to accomplish that goal. They didn't have to think about the simple machines. They've already committed that to memory. Now, they get to focus on the end goal. They were able to persevere through numerous trials in order to accomplish something really great.
So what could that look like in our libraries? Which opportunities are you taking in your library to create a learning environment where students can try things out over and over in order to reach a goal that is meaningful to them?
According to Winner, games improve the ability to persevere through gamers' experiences with the provision of time, opportunity, and incentive in the game. If these factors are missing, instructional scenarios may tend to limit students' development of perseverance. The skills and dispositions of perseverance are closely related to circumstances surrounding failure. For example, if the consequences of failure are perceived as too severe, if the outcomes don't seem worthwhile, or repeat attempts are prohibited or discouraged, students may be less likely to persevere through something hard or new in order to experience success.
At the conclusion of this lesson, Winner asks, "Which opportunities are you taking in your library to create a learning environment where students can try things out over and over in order to reach a goal that is meaningful to them?" For this exercise, respond to this question, either in writing, or perhaps in a conversation with a teaching colleague.
MLA Citation
Morris, Rebecca J. "Video Games for Learning: Opportunities to Try." School Library Connection, November 2024, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1985414?learningModuleId=1980803&topicCenterId=2247903.
Entry ID: 2122884
Additional Resources
About the Author
MLA Citation
Winner, Matthew C. "Video Games for Learning. Games Improve Our Perseverance [6:09]." School Library Connection, ABC-CLIO, November 2015, schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1985414?learningModuleId=1980803&topicCenterId=2247903.
https://schoollibraryconnection.com/Content/Course/1985414?learningModuleId=1980803&topicCenterId=2247903
Entry ID: 1985414