to think consciously again about skills that have become unconscious, taken-for-granted, and routine

hen learners learn a new skill set/strategy, they need to practice it over and over in varied contexts in order to make it operate at an almost unconscious routinized level.

the “principle of expertise,”

This feeling of the game being highly challenging, but ultimately doable, gives rise to a feeling of pleasurable frustration, one of the great joys of both deep learning and good gaming.

Good games allow players to operate within, but at the outer edge of, their competence. At lots of moments, a good game feels highly challenging, but ultimately “doable.” Perhaps the player fails a few times at a given task, but good games show how much progress the player has made on each try and the player sees that this progress is increasing each time he or she “fails.” Eventually success comes

that people draw deep pleasure from learning and that such learning keeps people playing.

For humans, real learning is always associated with pleasure and is ultimately a form of play—a principle almost always dismissed by schools.

For humans, real learning is always associated with pleasure and is ultimately a form of play—a principle almost always dismissed by schools.

there is never a real distinction between learning and playing.

These first real games are actually “hidden tutorials” which assist players in teaching themselves how to play RoN, not as a set of discrete skills, but as strategic thinking using an integrated system of skills. T

What all this means is that the player learns in the tutorial just enough to move on to learn more—and more subtle things—by actually playing the game, but playing it in a protected way so that deeper learning can occur through playing.

When you leave the tutorials and actually start playing, there is a pause key that will stop time. This allows you to explore what icons on the screen mean and think about what you want to do. When time is paused, your opponent(s) do not continue building and so you do not have to worry about falling behind.

and writing an essay thinking it is supposed to be a personal narrative won’t work.

The same thing is true of writing—there are some basic all-purpose things to learn (e.g. where to

Learners need to see this type of thing in action, not to be given static rules, if they are really to understand

Schools often try to teach kids to read and write, rather than read or write specific types of things like stories, reports, field notes, essays, or expositions

“Genre” just means what type of thing something is: for example, whether a novel is a mystery, romance, science fiction, etc., or a piece of writing is a story, report, essay, and so forth. RTS games are one type of computer/video game (there are many others, e.g. shooters, adventure games, role-playing games). They involve typical actions, rules, and strategies that are different from those involved in other types of games

through focused practice, a part of my embodied intelligence and not just the caprice of my risky verbal memory

nor was I meant to

But this tutorial is a specific type of particularly efficacious sandbox. It is a sandbox with a wise parent present to guide and confirm efficacious play in the sandbox—in this case proactive game designers. Let’s call this a “supervised sandbox.”

They need to be proactive, make decisions, think about what they are doing and learning, and take control of their own learning.

hat they need to assess their own progress, desires, and learning styles

The tutorial is a nice dance of the player’s actions and designers’ guidance and instructions

free to explore, try things, take risks, and make new discoveries

is protected from quick defeat and is free to explore, try things, take risks, and make new discoveries

t need not be as controlled and clean an environment as a fish tank.

but sealed off to be a protected and safe place where children can explore

you get what I call a “sandbox tutorial.”

This fish tank tutorial is also, of course, an example of what Vygotsky (1978) called learning within the learner’s “Zone of Proximal Development.”

We see the game as a system, not just a set of discrete skills

that is, in print, orally, and visually

We are having our hands held as we move through the fish tank (it’s what we can call a “supervised fish tank”).

I will call this a “fish tank tutorial,” because a fish tank can be, when done right, a simplified environment that lets one appreciate an ecosystem (e.g. a river, a pond, or reef in the ocean) by stripping away a good deal of complexity, but keeping enough to bring out some basic and important relationships.

In schools, too often, skills are decontextualized from the system (the “game”) and from each other.

it’s all about players being able to customize the game to their own desires and goals

Choice is built in from the beginning.

by letting learners assess themselves and learn things about what they do and do not know and what style of learning suits them here and now.

Schools tend to handle these problems by assessing the learner and then deciding for the learner how these problems ought to be dealt with.

In this case, school would be functioning more like a good game than traditional schooling which stresses knowledge apart from action and identity.

that their minds and bodies have been vastly extended

This is all “at risk” needs to mean in schools too, though there it often means giving “at-risk” learners a special dumbed-down curriculum meant to catch them up on “basic skills”—a curriculum that all too often is a bad learning experience for these students.

Horizontal experiences look like mucking around, but they are really ways of getting your feet wet, getting used to the water, and getting ready, eventually, to jump in and go swimming. They may, in one form or another, be essential to learning, or at least essential for learners who are “at risk.”

“Vertical” learning experiences are cases where a learner makes lots of incremental progress on a scale from low skills to high skills, as if moving up a ladder. “Horizontal” learning experiences are those where one does not make a lot of progress up the ladder of skills, but stays on the initial rungs awhile, exploring them and getting to know what some of the rungs are and what the ladder looks like

as I received my low or failing grade

hadprepared me for future learning

motivation for an extended engagement with the game

Good games are never really “too hard.” They fail, for some players, either because their designers did not use good learning principles or because players have, for one reason or another, failed to engage the good learning principles that are built into the games.

“at-risk” learner

alien to their taken-for-granted ways of thinking.

In the end, I hope to convince you that today’s young people often see deeper and better forms of learning going on in the games they play than in the schools they attend.

so we need to base our discussions of learning around actual cases of actual people learning

and a good number of other types

With the current return in our schools to skill-and-drill and curricula driven by standardized tests, good learning principles have, more and more, been left on the cognitive scientist’s laboratory bench and, I will argue, inside good computer and video games.

ven in domains outside games, even in school (Gee 2003)

Children are having more and more learning experiences outside of school that are more important for their futures than is much of the learning they do at school.

“shape-shifting portfolio people”:

One important way is via specially designed spaces (physical and virtual) constructed to resource people tied together, not primarily via shared culture, gender, race, or class, but by a shared interest or endeavor.

more equitable, less alienating, and more motivating.

they are a domain where young people of all races and classes readily learn specialist varieties of language and ways of thinking without alienation.

as some rich experiences with which you can build and run different simulations to get ready for different eventualities.

Think about how poorly such things go when you have had no prior experiences with which to build such role-playing simulations and you have to go in completely “cold.”

While confronting specialist academic languages and thinking in school is alienating, confronting non-academic specialist languages and thinking outside school often is not.

All children, privileged and not, can readily learn specialist varieties of language and their concomitant ways of thinking as part and parcel of their “popular culture.”

Indeed, many schools are barely aware they exist, that they have to be learned, and that the acquisition process must start early

Privileged children (children from well-off, educated homes) often get an important head start before school at home on the acquisition of such academic varieties of language; less privileged children (poor children or children from some minority groups) often do not

Unfortunately, a good many students, at all levels of schooling, hate the types of language associated with academic content areas

But, then, the core argument of this book will be that people learn new ways with words, in or out of school, only when they find the worlds to which these words apply compelling.

but a liberating entrée to new worlds

computer and video games

It is about facing that tension at a time when these academic and school-based ways are challenged by new ways with words and new ways of thinking and learning.

We have barely begun on the first task only to have the second become more pressing by the day.

all children—rich and poor

and things are more problematic now.

If you didn’t like school, the first paragraph reminded you a lot of school, except that school didn’t even try to titillate you with nakedness and decapitation.

Barry Josep

in class and out