Archive | January, 2012

News that defined us

Helping young people to critically “read” the news is crucial if we are to develop a society that can make sense of unfolding events.  Increasingly, children are disengaged from “reliable” mainstream news organisation and instead use partisan or unsubstantiated sources for their information about current affairs and the world around them. The News that Defined […]

Experiential learning and Games

Many theorists propose that we learn from our experiences that is, that effective perception and processing of experiences improves performance. Merrill suggests that the most effective learning environments have problem solving as their basis.  This trial and improvement, problem-solving covers four distinct phases of learning: Activation of prior experience; Demonstration of skills; Application of skills; […]

Constructivism and Games

Continuing my series on the relationship between the various learning theories and games, this post explores the idea of constructivism. From the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response phenomenon as described by Behaviourism, rather it requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction[1]. In constructivist theory, the learner takes an […]

Cognitivism and games

In this, the second part of my series on examining how learning theories relate to game play, I’m looking at the theory that suggests learning is dependent on mental capacity – cognitivism. Cognitivism replaced Behaviourism as the dominant learning paradigm in the 1960s[1]. Cognitive psychology proposes that learning comes from mental activity such as memory, […]

Behaviourism and Games

Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between Learning Theory and Game Design.  Clearly there are game mechanics that exploit particular learning traits and I thought it would be interesting to identify them. Researchers have long studied the way in which individuals learn.  Over the years, academics have proposed a number of theories to describe […]