Shouldn't we base our educational systems primarily on Play?

I was asked "shouldn't we base our entire educational systems primarily on Play?", I think not, but we should use all we know about play to guide education.

School is a new invention, it is only a couple of hundred of years old. Before that, learning alongside adults also contributed to children's development. Children would learn alongside adults in the field, the kitchen and at the forge. Call it apprenticeship learning. Schools became necessary after the industrial revolution in part to free adults from childcare. Also, as society becomes more complex, some kinds of learning become too specialised to learn in a village apprenticeship way.

The points here are that

* play was never enough on its own

* school performs purposes other than learning

* the needs of society have changed since play evolved in mammals

It is time, now that technology gives us options, to reconsider the teacher at the blackboard in front of a class of children. It was only ever a stopgap compromise. We should consider what we know of play and learning and see if we can improve on the "talk and chalk" model.

Learning is best if it is authentic, like apprenticeship. It is much more motivating if you can produce something real and of value to others. Perhaps this was what Papert meant with constructionism (the N word not the V word) that learning "happens especially felicitously in a context where the learner is consciously engaged in constructing a public entity, whether it's a sand castle on the beach or a theory of the universe" http://www.papert.org/articles/SituatingConstructionism.html

Learning is best when it is relevant, when you can see that what you are learning will actually be useful to you.

There must be a balance between effort and achievement or reward. Too hard and you give up, too easy and you are bored. (I read somewhere that motivation is highest when the chance of success is 50%). You can visualise effort and achievement (reward) as two curves that have to match. We are familiar with the initial learning hump where effort is not matched by achievement/reward .

Immediate feedback. Problem solving in games works well when you can quickly test your hypothesis. The problem solving process works like the debugging process that computer programmers are familiar with. You test, arrive at a hypothesis or solution and then implement. When the implement & test part of the cycle is quick, as in programming, you spend most of your time in the cognitive conflict or cognitive dissonance part of the cycle. This is where the real cognitive development occurs. It is very frustrating but it is almost addictively motivating. Ask any computer programmer or game player whether they have still been on the computer at 3am. "I'll just fix this program bug...." or "I'll just add some more roads to my Sim City...."

Peer tutoring. Rather than locking kids into a competitive process through assessment, they should be placed in an environment where they can cooperate too. Then you can have a class full of teachers. The best way to learn is to teach something. See http://schoolgamemaker.rupert.id.au/computerclub/ Is the emphasis on assessment an attempt to motivate kids through competition in the otherwise boring environment of "talk and chalk" classrooms? I read somewhere that less than 15% of teachers use assessment as feedback to tailor how and what students learn.

An example of a cross curriculum games based project is at http://www.freewebs.com/schoolgamemaker/IT%20Course-game.doc

Making Learning Fun, A Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivations for Learning

Here I continue discussion of readings for Instructional Simulations & Games, IDT 545, http://www.idt.und.edu/index.html

Making Learning Fun, A Taxonomy of Intrinsic Motivations for Learning
Malone and Lepper
In Aptitude Learning and Instruction Ed. Snow

The authors seek to set up instructional environments that are intrinsically motivating. They look to computer games and their motivating features.

They quote "The will to learn is an intrinsic motive, one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise. The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined and a path fixed" (Bruner)

This is possibly not quite the same as the Crawford position that play IS learning (The Art of Computer Game Design http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html)

They propose these classes of motivation:

challenge
fantasy
curiosity
control
co-operation
competition
recognition

In a study of game preferences of 65 elementary elementary school students (Malone 1981), they found the following correlation with preference:

Goal 0.65**
computer keeps score 0.56**
Audio effects 0.51**
Randomness involved in game 0.48**
Speed of answers counts 0.36*
Visual effects 0.34
Competition 0.31
Variability difficulty level 0.17
Cooperation 0.02
Fantasy 0.06
Graphic game 0.38*
Math game -0.2
Word game -0.38

It is noted that those correlations marked with ** have 98% confidence (p<0.02) and
those marked with * have 95% confidence(p<0.05). If (p<0.05), one can not state with any confidence that there is any correlation, any observed correlation is statistically insignificant because of the sample size.

Malone and Lepper are often quoted on the importance of endogenous fantasy. It is noteworthy that in this study, fantasy had no effect on player preference whatever.

Also, this study finds no correlation with cooperation. Cooperation is often quoted by higher level players of World of Warcraft as a strong motivator. WoW is highly successful with more than 6 million paid subscribers http://www.mmogchart.com/ It should be noted that at the time of the study, 1981, computer games were quite unsophisticated by today's standards.

Habgood conducted an experiment to see if children would create a learning game with endogenous or exogenous fantasy, they created games without fantasy. This indicates that fantasy may not play an inportant role in motivation.
http://www.zombiedivision.co.uk/

Also, there was little evidence of fantasy in games made in a computer club, http://tonyforster.blogspot.com/2006/07/other-worlds-and-game-creation.html

Malone & Lepper go on to say "fantasy ... is clearly important in many kinds of intrinsically motivating activities, such as computer games, television, reading, and dramatic play (cf Singer 1973)" (Singer 1973 The child's World of make-believe
http://www.amazon.com/Childs-World-Make-Believe-Experimental/dp/0126466602)

I have not read Singer's book but I doubt Singer was commenting on computer games, computer games barely, if at all, existed then http://www.pong-story.com/inventor.htm

Many computer games have a back story, often told in the opening cinematics, but I doubt it plays a major factor in most gamers' enjoyment.

Did Malone & Lepper ignore their own data? It looks a bit as if they allowed their own assumptions to override their experimental data.