Cool Tips for Teachers, Parents: How to make learning irresistible to teenagers

Failure is a positive act of creativity. Scientists, artists, engineers, and even entrepreneurs know this as adults. But in schools, the notion of failure is complicated.

Any practice – athletic, artistic, even social – involves repeatedly failing till one gets the experience or activity right. We need to “keep the challenge constant so players are able to fail and try again. It’s hard and it leads to something rewarding.”

For example, when we’re playing a well-designed game, failure doesn’t disappoint us. It makes us happy in a very particular way; excited, interested, and most of all optimistic. ‘Fun failure’ even makes us more resilient, which keeps us emotionally safe.

But the opposite is true in school. Schools usually give students one chance to get something right; failing grades work against practice, mastery, and creativity. To keep kids motivated, learning needs to be irresistible.

Below are some of gaming principles that can be applied to education:

1. Don’t shoot the player while she’s learning. Too much drama, too nerve-wracking or scary an environment makes it hard for participants to learn. Students need space to think, look around, process, and reflect.

2. Learning is social. Problem-solving is increasingly collaborative. Players, like students, can bring ideas to the process that designers don’t even think of. We need to design a classroom as a community in which the participants’ knowledge is valued and the exchange of their own expertise is valued. Most challenges in school today only deal with individual problem-solving. Tests don’t reward collaborative problem-solving. Sharing is often seen as cheating,” while collaborating in cross-functional teams is what’s needed more and more in a complex world.

3. A strong sense of community creates safety. Open up space for students to interact with one another, a space for which you’ve created 1) a need to know, 2) a need to share what they know, and 3) the infrastructure for that sharing. “Sharing should feel like a gift. Let students participate in the designing too. In participatory learning, like open-source code writing, the design keeps getting better.

4. Learning that empowers the learner helps make it irresistible. Empowering a player to do something feels like a “force flows through your veins like you can change the world around you.” When we can design learning experiences that feel like that, we make learning irresistible.