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.

Just a game?

I met with some very impressive young people yesterday during my visit to a local secondary school. I was visiting Saltash.Net Community School with one of my Austrian research colleagues to see how the school is using e-learning approaches and harnessing Web 2.0 tools. In my opinion, Saltash is one of the most innovative schools in the country, which is underlined by the amount of national awards it has been given recently. Around the table at lunch, in the Headteacher's office, we sat eating pizza and drinking fruit juice with five year 10 students. The talk inevitably turned to internet games (I actually initiated this part of the conversation) and suddenly the students because very animated. They enthused over Farmville, the Sims and other long games and talked about how much they enjoyed playing them.

I asked them what they actually learned from playing games such as Farmville. They didn't miss a beat. One bright young lad said that he learned how to organise his time and make better schedules to plough ground, sow seeds and reap crops. 'If you don't time it perfectly, your crops die' he said. Another student said that to organise her time and calculate how much she was earning and spending on Farmville, she used a spreadsheet alongside the game. This taught her how to plan for expenditure and calculate how much she could expand her farm next time. I think she is also learning how to integrate tools together to amplify her learning. Time management, organisation, planning - these are clearly very important skills that can be applied to formal learning activities.

The teachers in the room were clearly interested in these views and I could see them trying to work out how to capitalise on the affordances of these popular games in the classroom. In other words, they were interested in taking the power and attraction of informal learning tools and harnessing or leveraging them within formal learning contexts. It's the Holy Grail of education - and it's not easy.

I read a very interesting blog post entitled 10 things I learned from Farmville about real life farming which included such gems as 'looking after your neighbours' - that is, collaborative working. I'm sure there are a huge number of transferrable life skills children can acquire tacitly from games like Farmville and The Sims, including planning, time management, problem solving and coping with disappointment. Such games are often maligned by some teachers and parents as a 'waste of time' and children do, if allowed, play for long periods of time on such games. But doesn't that tell us something about the power of these tools to engage, enthrall and educate? How can we harness this power in the classroom - that is the question...

Related posts:

The Professor, the Pizza and Farmville (Dan Roberts)

Saltash School (Bernhard Standl)

Image source