Schrater is aiming his research efforts at “quantifying curiosity” as a factor in motivation.

Still, The Sword in the Stone effect has its limits. “If you bang your head against a wall too many times, you’ll quit,” Ryan says. “So there’s got to be some kind of expectation that you can break through, that it’s possible if you work or think or practice hard enough.”

According to self-determination theory, these principles boil down to three domains in which humans experience universal psychological needs: autonomy (the urge to be the cause of one’s own behavior or choices); relatedness (the urge to connect with others and identify with a group); and competence (the desire to control or influence the outcomes of one’s behavior).

which combine the opt-in interactivity of play with the programmatic constraints of a controlled lab experiment—have become a powerful tool for psychologists interested in understanding intrinsic motivation.

These games seem to defy the normal rules of motivation and engagement—but on closer examination, they’re not exceptional at all.

Officials announce that an American hydrogenbomb test had been conducted on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

Although she did not have learning supports or many friends who shared her interest, the online world opened up a new site for learning and specialization. Not only was Clarissa able to reach out to form a new peer group that was knowledge and expertise-driven, but she was able to take what she learned from the online context and connect it to her school achievement. She was acquiring individual skills and knowledge, as well as adding value to a community by sharing her own knowledge and creating high-quality work.

Connected learning addresses the gap between in-school and out-of-school learning, intergenerational disconnects, and new equity gaps arising from the privatization of learning.

Rewriting the rules is a practice related to both messing around and geeking out. However, there are important differences in the ways in which the rules are rewritten in each of these genres of participation. Like messing around, which involves an inchoate awareness of the need and ability to subvert social rules set by parents and institutions such as school, geeking out frequently requires young people to negotiate restrictions on access to friends, spaces, or information to achieve the frequent and intense interaction with media and technology characteristic of geeking out.

articularly when it comes to massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs), the intensive engagement associated with geeking out as a genre of participation extends beyond participation within the boundaries of the game world and to the para-texts10 that support and extend the game. Paratexts take many forms, varying from gaming magazines and offi cial guides published by game manufacturers, to player-generated guides and tutorials, to materials more recognizable as fan texts such as fan fi ction and fan art.

people in Mizuko Ito’s “Anime Fans” study, in Becky Herr-Stephenson’s “Harry Potter Fandom” study, or the more committed gamers who partici-pated in Matteo Bittanti’s “Game Play” study. The term “geeking out” can be used to describe the everyday practices of some of the gamers and media producers who participated in our project.

The ability to mess around requires access to media, technology, and social resources that are not always available to youth. Just as in the case of hanging out, messing around is a genre of participation that is driven by young people’s own interests and motivations.

When compared to participants in these surveys, our survey participants2appear, on average, to be more engaged with new media than national aver-ages. While Pew’s 2007 survey found that 63 percent of American teens go online daily, 75 percent of our surveyed participants reported going online daily and 85 percent reported going online at least a few times a week.

The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—refl ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies

We also recognize that the ways in which U.S. youth participate in media ecologies are specifi c to contextual conditions and a particular historical moment. In line with our sociocultural perspective on learning and literacy, we see young people’s learning and participation with new media as situationally contingent, located in specifi c and varied media ecologies. Before we begin our description of youth practice, we need to map what those ecologies of media and participation look like. That is the goal of this chapter.

Even youth who do not possess computers and Internet access in the home are participants in a shared culture where new social media, digital media distribution, and digital media production are com-monplace among their peers and in their everyday school contexts.

While Geo Gem has accepted the fact that she can watch only the occasional movie on the family DVD player, she notes that this often presents problems when her friends come over, “since they usually watch cable.” Instead of watching television, Geo Gem plays games such as basketball, online games, and the GameCube.

The “kids’ computer” is a secondhand desktop computer that sits in the living room and the GameCube is dated. Moreover, Geo Gem’s parents decided not to buy cable in an effort to

At the same time, the close attention Luis’s mother paid to his work at the clubhouse allowed her to recognize the importance of capitalizing on his outside interests to motivate his production.

Luis and his mother frequently talked about subject matter for his movies, with her suggesting that he do something “funny, because he is funny, he has a good sense of humor” and him replying that he “likes monsters and gore.” In addition to being an audience for his projects and discussing ideas, Luis’s mother also moni-tored Luis’s work on the computer. At the end of seventh grade, Luis’s grades in school were falling to the point where he was worried he would need to repeat the grade . His parents attributed some of this to his spending too much time on his extracurricular computer projects, like the computer animation, and sought to limit his work.

Luis noticed the video camera equipment in the space and, using his existing knowledge and interest from working with his brother, set out to make live action movies with his friends, “I just asked [the clubhouse coordinators] what it was and they old me and it was for taping and stuff, so I just started running around taping my friends, trying to do scenes and stuff....” The clubhouse was equipped with Intel Digital Blue cameras and although the clubhouse coordinators had taken a work-shop on how to use them, they were not experts in this fi eld. The camera set, which could be used to shoot both video and still images and came with its own editing and special effects software, became Luis’s main tool for creating. He returned to the cameras again and again, experimenting with different methods.

Our representations of Luis’s activities in narrative form provide what might be called a wide-angle view of learning, losing direct observation of micro-interactional phenomena but offering a glimpse at the dynamics of learning and interest develop-ment over weeks, months, and years (Lemke, 2000 )

C o m m u n i t y t e c h n o l o g y c e n t e r s c a n p r o v i d e a n i m p o r t a n t s p a c e f o r y o u t h w i t h l e s s home access, offering multiple opportunities to learn through mentors and material resources (Kafai, Peppler, & Chapman, 2010 ; P e n u e l , e t a l . , 2000 ) . I n o u r s n a p s h o t of Simmons, youth are diligently working on their stop-motion animation skills, tinkering with the timing of their movie soundtracks, and laying down complex beats in the recording studio. Observations of the creative work emerging from environ-ments like the clubhouse raise a host of questions about the learning activities that take place there, how they evolve over time and place, and who is involved.

. I t i s becoming increasingly evident that differences in the types of participation youth engage in will further contribute to inequities along gender, SES, or cultural dimensions.

A l t h o u g h t h e s e c u l t u r e s o f p a r t i c i p a t i o n a r e b e c o m i n g m o r e c o m m o n , t h e y a r e not equally accessed. Recent research has shown that despite the emerging cultural image of the average youth as constantly connected and technologically savvy, those who can actually create digital media or interactive environments are in the minority (Barron, Walter, Martin, & Schatz, 2010 ; I t o e t a l . , 2009 )

Welcome to the Simmons Computer Clubhouse, part of an international network of over 100 similar informal after-school learning environ-ments where young people work with adult mentors to “explore their own ideas, develop skills, and build con fi dence in themselves through the use of technology.”