At Online Educa in Berlin, they apparently had a debate on fun in learning. The proposition was “all learning should be fun”.  And while the answer is obviously ‘no’, I think that it’s too simplistic of a question. So I want to dig a bit deeper into fun, engagement, and learning, how the right alignment is ‘hard fun’.

Donald Clark weighs in with a summary of the debate and the point he thought was the winner. He lauds Patti Shank, who pointed out that research talks about ‘desirable difficulty’. And I can’t argue with this (besides, Patti’s usually spot-on).  He goes on to cite how you read books that aren’t funny, and that how athletes train isn’t particularly giggle-inducing.  All of which I agree with, except this “Engagement and fun are proxies and the research shows that effort trumps fun every time.”  And I think tying engagement and fun together is a mistake.

There is the trivial notion of fun, to be fair.  The notion that it’s breezily entertaining.  But I want to make a distinction between such trivial attention and engagement.  For instance, I would argue that a movie like Schindler’s List is wholly engaging, but I’m not sure I would consider it ‘fun’.  And even ‘entertaining’ is a stretch. But I think it’s compelling. Similarly with even reading books for entertainment: many aren’t ‘fun’ in the sense of light entertainment and humor, but are hard to put down. So what’s going on here?

I think that cognitive (and emotional) immersion is also ‘engagement’.  That is, you find the story gripping, the action compelling, or the required performance to be a challenge, but you persist because you find it engaging in a deeper sense.

Raph Koster wrote A Theory of Fun about game design, but the underlying premise was that why games were ‘fun’ is that they were about learning. The continually increasing challenge, set in a world that you find compelling (we don’t all like the same games), is what makes a game fun. Similarly, I’ve written about engagement as a far more complex notion than just a trivial view of fun.

The elements of the alignment between effective education practice and engaging experiences demonstrate that learning can, and should, be hard fun. This isn’t the trivial sort of ‘fun’ that apparently is what Donald and Patti were concerned about.  It is all about ‘desirable difficulty’, having a challenge in the zone that’s Czikszentmihalyi’s Flow and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development.

I agree that just making it fun (just as putting high production values on under-designed content dump) isn’t the answer. But just making it ‘work’ doesn’t help either.  You want people to see the connection between what they’re doing and their goals. Learners should have a level of challenge that helps them know that they’re working toward that goal. You want them to recognize that the tasks are for achieving that goal. It’s about integrating the cognitive elements of learning with the emotional components of engagement in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The synergy is what is needed.

I think fun and engagement aren’t the same thing. So while I agree with the premise that learning shouldn’t be the trivial sense of fun, I think the more rigorous sense should be the goal of learning. We want learning to be a transformation, not just a trudge nor a treat.  I’ll argue that the athletes and the readers and the others who are learning are engaged, just not amused. And that’s the important distinction. This is, to me, what Learning Experience Design should be, designing hard fun. And I think we can do this; my upcoming workshop at Learning Solutions is about doing just that. Hope to see you there!

Someone asked me what I would say about my first book, Engaging Learning. And, coincidentally, my client just gave some copies to their client as part of our engagement, so I guess there’s still value in it!  And while I recognize it’s now about 13 years old, I really do believe it has relevance. Since they asked…

I saw the connections between computers and learning as an undergraduate, and designed my own major. My first job out of college was designing and programming educational computer games. Long story short: I went back for a Ph.D. in what was effectively ‘applied cognitive science’, but games continued to play a role in my career. And I reflected on it, and ultimately what started as a research agenda manifested as a model for explaining why games work and how to do it. And then when I started consulting, Pfeiffer asked me to write the book.

To be clear, I believe engagement matters.  We learn better when our hearts and our minds are engaged. (That’s the intent of the double meaning of the title, after all.)  Learning sticks when we’re motivated and in a ‘safe’ learning situation.  Learning can, and should, be ‘hard fun’.  However,  if we can’t do it reliably and repeatedly, it’s just a dream. I believe that if we systematically apply the principles in the book, we can do it (systematic creativity is not an oxymoron ;).

One of the concerns was that things were changing fast even then (Flash was still very much in play, for example ;).  How to write something that wouldn’t be outdated even before it came out?  So I tied it to cognitive principles, as our brains aren’t changing that fast.  Thus, I think the principles in it still hold.  I’ve continued to check and haven’t found anything that undermines the original alignment that underpins designing engaging experiences.

And the book was designed for use. While the first three chapters set the stage, the middle three dig into details. There you’ll find the core framework, examples, and a design process. The design process was focused mostly on adding to what you already do, so as not to be redundant. The final three chapters wrap up pragmatics and future directions.

While ostensibly (and realistically) about designing games, it was really about engagement. For instance, the principles included were applied backwards to branching scenarios, and what I called linear and mini-scenarios. The latter just being better written multiple choice questions!

The book couldn’t cover everything, and I’ve expanded on my thinking since then, but I believe the core is still there: the alignment and the design process in particular. There have been newer books since then by others (I haven’t stayed tied to just games, my mind wanders more broadly ;) and by me, but as with my other books I think the focus on the cognitive principles gives lasting guidance that still seems to be relevant. At a recent event, someone told me that while I viewed mobile as a known, for others it wasn’t. I reckon that may be true for games and engagement as well. If we’re making progress, I’m pleased. So, please, start engaging learning by making engaging learning!

PS, I wrote a Litmos blog post about why engagement matters, as a prelude to a session I’ll be giving at their Litmos Live online event (Nov 7-8) where I talk about how to do it.

In a meeting today, I was asked “how do you define engagement”, and I found it an intriguing question. I don’t know that I have a definition so much as steps to enhance it. Still, it made me think.

What engagement is not, let’s be clear, is tarting content up. It’s not just flashy visuals, stereotypes, and cute prose.  Those things add aesthetics (or, done poorly, undermine same), but that’s not where to go.

Instead, I’m looking for an experience that has certain characteristics. One way of looking at it is through the ‘flow’ phenomenon, with cognitive immersion at a level that finds the sweet spot between frustration and boring.  Similarly, for learning, it’s the Zone of Proximal Development, between what you can do with one hand tied behind your back, and what you can’t do no matter how much support you get.  And it’s both.

You there by exploiting the alignment between the elements of practice and engaging experiences. So just as the above diagram can represent either Czikszentmihalyi or Vygotsky, there’s the alignment I highlighted in Engaging Learning between the elements in greater elaboration. It’s goal, context, challenge, meaningfulness, and more all aligned to create that subjective feeling. And in case you say “you’re extending engagement to learning”, I will note that Koster, in his book A Theory of Fun, explicitly tied what makes games work is that it’s about learning. So, yeah, that’s the type of engagement I’m interested in, regardless.

One of the simple ways I like to characterize it (and it’s not original with me), is ‘hard fun’.  I think, if nothing else, that’s a great heuristic. It may be like the famous quote about pornography: “you know it when you see it”. Or maybe you can coin a concise definition. And you can attempt to quantify it through objective criteria like galvanic skin response or adrenalin levels. However, I’m perfectly happy to use subjective criteria. If people say they found it challenging but fun, I’m happy. If they say it’s the best way they can see to learn it, my job is done.

I don’t really yet have a good way to define engagement in a concise specification. Do you have a definition of engagement you like?  I’d welcome hearing it!

I’ve argued before that we should be thinking about exaggeration in our learning design. And I’ve noticed that it’s a dramatic trick in popular media. But you can easily think of ways it can go wrong. So what would be appropriate exaggeration?

When I look at movies and other story-telling media (comics), the exaggeration usually is one level.  You know, it’s like real life but some aspect is taken beyond what’s typical. So, more extreme events happen: the whacky neighbor is maniacal, or the money problems are potentially fatal, or the unlikely events on a trip are just more extreme.  And this works; real life is mundane, but you go too far and it treads past the line of believability. So there’s a fine line there.

Now, when we’re actually performing, whether with customers or developing a solution, it matters. It’s our job after all, and people are counting on us.  There’s plenty of stress, because there are probably not enough time, and too much work, and…

However, in the learning situation, you’re just mimicking the real world. It’s hard to mimic the stress that comes from real life. So, I’m arguing, we should be bringing in the extra pressure through the story. Exaggerate!  You’re not just helping a customer, you’re helping the foreign ambassador’s daughter, and international relations are at stake!  Or the person you’re sweet on (or the father of said person) is watching!  This is the chance to have fun and be creative!

Now, you can’t exaggerate everything. You could add extraneous cognitive load in terms of processing if you make it too complex in the details. And you definitely don’t want to change the inherent decisions in the task and decrease the relevance of the learning. To me, it’s about increasing the meaning of the decisions, without affecting their nature. Which may require a bit of interpretation, but I think it’s manageable.

At core, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say exaggeration is one of your tools to enhance engagement and effectiveness. The closer we bring the learning situation to the performance situation, the higher the transfer. And if we increase the meaningfulness of the learning context to match the performance context, even if the details are more dissimilar, I think it’s an effective tradeoff. What do you think?

Yesterday I wrote about examples as stories. And I received a comment that prompted some reflection. The comment suggested that scenarios were stories too. And I agree!  They’re not examples, but they are stories. With a twist.

So, as I’ve said many times, simulations are just a manipulable model of the world. And a motivated, self-capable learner can learn from them. But motivated and self-capable isn’t always a safe bet. So, instead, we put the simulation in an initial state, and ask the learner to take it to a goal state, and we choose those such that they can’t get there until they learn the relationships we want them to understand. That’s what I call a scenario.  And we can tune those into a game. (Yes, we turn them into games by tuning; making the setting compelling, adjusting the challenge, etc.)

Now, a scenario needs a number of things. It needs a context, a setting. It needs a goal, a situation to be achieved. And, I’ll suggest, it should also have a reason for that goal to make sense. If you see the alignment that says why games should be hard fun, you’ll see that making it meaningful is one of the elements. And that, I say, is a story. Or, at least, the beginning of one.

In short, a story has a setting, a goal, and a path to get there. We remove boring details, highlight the tension, etc.  We flesh out a setting that the learner cares about, provide a sense of urgency, and enable the goal achievement.  But it’s not all done.

The reason this isn’t a complete story is we don’t know the path the protagonist uses to accomplish the goal, or ultimately doesn’t.  We’ve provided tools for that to happen, but we, as designers, don’t control the protagonist. The learner, really, is the the protagonist!

What I’m talking about is that the story, certainly for the learner, is co-created between the world we’ve developed, and their use of the options or choices we provide. Together, a story is written for them by us and them.  And, their decisions and the feedback are the story and the learning!  It’s, voilà, a learning experience.

Learning is powerful. Creating experiences that facilitate learning are creative hard fun for the designer, and valuable hard fun for the learner. Learning is about stories, some told, some c0-created, but all valuable.

The game we designed (as I talked about yesterday), Quest for Independence, was actually a fair bit of a hit. While we couldn’t talk to kids still, anecdotally we heard that the kids were playing it. And, as the design intended, it led them to talk to the Care counselors. That was good enough, but there was more.

First, the Aussie science program Quantum had a bit on it. They even interviewed me (with a big production about bringing stuff to our house), but never used the footage.  They also couldn’t talk to the kids ‘in care’, but it turns out Quest was being used by kids not in care!  High schools were using it to explore life after school as well. That was a nice outcome.

Another occurrence brought new action. Sometime after the game launched, I became aware of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) standard for the web. What this did was allowed web pages to do backend processing based upon user actions, and then programmatically change the front end.  In short, web pages could react based upon what had happened before.

For Quest, this meant that we could port it to the web!  That is, you started the game, the player’s actions were sent to the web, the program could calculate the outcome and render an appropriate new page, with the graphics assembled to represent the game variables, the current location, and more.  This was exciting.

And, again, I had a student wanting to do a project. So the project was to take the game graphics, and the programming, and make the game web-playable. And lo, it was done; the game could be played over the web.  Most wonderfully, it still can be!  (Yay, standards!)

Naturally, I wrote it up (with the student; a principle I always stuck to: even if I usually ended up writing it all, they got credit for their work and ideas).  And, as far as I know, it was the very first web-delivered serious game. At the least, without Flash.

The underlying principles in the game also became part of a couple of chapters, and ultimately the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences formed the core of my book on serious game design, Engaging Learning.  

One final reflection is that working on this, on a project that really helped real kids, was still one of the most rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on.  It’s nice to help clients deliver outcomes, but saving lives that were at risk?  That’s just too good.  Anyone up for some more ‘hard fun’?

When I was a young academic in Australia, a colleague asked me if I would talk to some folks about a game. He knew that I had designed games before returning to grad school, and had subsequently done one on my thesis research. This group, the Australian Children’s Welfare Agency, had an ‘After Care’ project to assist kids  who needed to live independently. They’d spent their budget on a video, comic book, and a poster, but now realized that the kids would play games at the Care centers. I had a talented student who wanted to do a meaningful honours project, and so I agreed.

Following best principles, we talked not only to the project leaders, and the counselors, but more. We weren’t allowed to talk to youth ‘in care’ (for obvious reasons), but they did get us access to some recent graduates. They gave us great insights, and later they playtested the prototype for fine-tuning.

One of the lessons from this was important. The counselors told us that what these kids needed were to learn to shop and cook. While I could have made a game for that, when we talked to the kids we learned that there was more. (My claim: you can’t give me a learning objective I can’t make a game for, though I reserve the right to raise the objective in a taxonomic sense.)  They said what was important were the chains. That is, you could get money while you looked for a job, but… They wouldn’t give you money, however, they’d deposit in a bank account. BUT, to get that, you needed ID.  To get that, however, you needed references. And so on. So that was the critical focus.

I taught my interface design students HyperCard, to have a simple language to prototype in. This meant that we had an environment that we knew games could be built in.  My student did most of the programming, under my direction.  When that wasn’t quite sufficient to finish the development, I used some grant money to hire her for the summer to finish it.

The resulting play was good, but the design was lacking (neither my student nor I were graphic designers). I ended up going with the project team leaders to get philanthropic funding to add graphics. (Which introduced bugs I had to fix.)  They also had it ported to the PC, which ended up being a mistake.Their hired gun used a platform with an entirely different underlying model and wasn’t able to translate it appropriately. Ouch.

The resulting game, had some specific design features:

• It was exploratory, in that the player had to wander around and try to survive.
• It was built upon a simple simulation engine, which supported replay.
• There were variables, like health and hunger and sleep that would get worse over time, driving action.
• The audience was low literacy, so we used graphics to convey variable states, interface elements, and location.
• Success was difficult. Jobs were difficult to obtain, and better jobs were even harder. And, of course, you had to discover the chains.
• There was coaching: if you were struggling, the game would offer you the opportunity for a hint. If you continued to struggle, eventually you’d get the hint anyway.
• There was also a help system, where the basics were laid out.
• There were random events, like getting (or losing) money, or having drugs or sex. (We were trying to save lives, and didn’t worry about upsetting the wowsers.)

There was more, but this characterized some of the important elements.  In reflecting upon the experience, I realized the alignment between effective education and engaging experiences that means you can, and should, make learning hard fun.  I wrote a journal article (with my student) that captured what I will suggest are critical realizations (still!).

They held an event to launch the entire project, including the game (and they gave me a really nice sweater, and Dana something too ;).  Tomorrow, I’ll pass on some of the subsequent outcomes.