Permission to fail

Playing Angry Birds earlier today made me realise afresh that one of the key strengths of games based learning is the freedom to fail. Games offer a psychologically safe environment within which to learn new things. There are no sanctions for failing - but there is the chance to try again and try again. As with real life, you don't always get it right, but you then have the option to learn from your mistakes, and improve your skills, or fail to learn, and make the same mistakes all over. Ultimately, in trying again, you hone your skills or thinking, and assess your performance against previous ones. Social gaming takes this a step farther, in that you can also learn from other people's mistakes. Games like Farmville may be addictive and seen by some as a waste of valuable time, but at the same time, they enable players to learn new skills. So if you don't tend your crops, they wither and die. If you take care of your neighbours, they are likely to reciprocate. It's an analogue of real life. 

Playing games enables us to learn new skills, practice new thought processes, and create and apply strategies in new and unfamiliar contexts. The fantasy and suspension of reality enable hypothesis testing and problem solving on the fly, both extremely important transferable skills. But it is the ability to fail repeatedly, and still remain in the game that is the greatest affordance of games based learning. What could teachers achieve if more school systems afforded this? Imagine what children heights children would be able to attain if instead of being frowned upon for dreaming the impossible and asking the 'what if' questions, they were rewarded for their enterprise, risk taking and creative thinking?

One of the new features at next year's Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference - PELeCON 2012 - will be a 'failure confessional'. The session, which I will host (but not necessarily wearing the vestments of a priest) will be an invitation for any delegate to talk about their failures, and crucially, what they learnt from their mistakes. Too often at conferences, success is lauded as the only criterion to be judged by. The thinking behind the failure confessional, is that researchers and teachers can tell their stories 'warts and all', in the hope that everyone can learn from the experience. We hope to see you at PELeCON next year, 18-20 April, so we can learn from each other. And you have permission to fail.

Image by Dan Pupius


Permission to fail by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.