I regularly read articles about the educational system, changes in schooling, and how our brain actually learns and develops. Over the years, I have seen the system (both at home in the Netherlands and abroad) change into something more “playful”.
More and more, textbooks try to put every bit of material into a game format. Teachers are highly encouraged to gamify whatever they do. A large part of the fundamentals, such as early language and mathematics, have shifted to methodologies that are about keeping the child engaged and optimizing their fun at school. Increasingly, if the child is not having fun, they are deemed “in their right” to not learn anything and get bad grades.
As expected, this often elicits a response like “America is too obsessed with the idea that school should be fun”. The response that learning is supposed to be hard and challenging. That school is not about having fun, it’s about being prepared for society, doing your “duty” as a citizen and learning the crucial skills.
I find this very interesting. As you might expect, the truth is somewhere in the middle. A place where almost no teacher or parent resides, unfortunately.
Learning should be hard
On the one hand, yes, learning should be hard. If something is not a challenge, then there is no learning happening. That’s a logical fact. If you can already do something easily, then you must have learned it earlier in your life (or you’re God)—you are not learning anything by doing it now.
In fact, I’ve often spoken about something called “desirable difficulty”. The way to learn more, and learn it faster, is by desiring things to be hard and challenges to be tough. By designing your habits and mind-set to make this a benefit instead of an issue. The only way to get stronger, is by challenging your muscles and asking it to do something they can’t easily do.
As such, it is fine if a child struggles with material. It doesn’t mean the teacher has explained it badly, it doesn’t mean the child is stupid, it means they are learning. Yay! That’s the whole point! I’d be more scared of a school that never introduces a hard challenge or sets a high bar for a child, than one that asks too much.
Learning should be fun
On the other hand, learning should be fun, absolutely.
Let’s ask ourselves: What is fun? Or let’s start more simply: what is a game?
Think about it. We can look at different types of games.
- Physical Games (Sports): these are made-up problems (such as having to get a ball in a goal and you may only use your feet) that are exhausting and strain your muscles.
- Board Games: these are made-up rules that require reading them, lots of setup, using your hands to move pieces around all the time, and possibly counting a lot of numbers to decide who wins.
- Video Games: these are made-up challenges that require learning buttons, trying again and again, just to get some non-tangible reward like numbers or text on a screen.
Why do we find these fun? Why do we love games if they’re all just artificial challenges that are hard to beat? Why do we voluntarily put immense effort into overcoming completely made up problems and call them “fun games”?
Because being challenged is not bad. Because being presented with a problem, then working hard to solve said problem, is not “bad” or “boring” or “torture”. It is such a core part of being a human, it is such a valuable trait, that we’ve evolved to derive pleasure from it. We are all hardwired to acquire fun out of learning and overcoming challenges.
As such, if you’re actually learning, then it’s fun by default. It’s human nature to feel pride, accomplishment, satisfaction, release upon doing hard work and solving a hard problem.
We’re thinking in the wrong direction
Gamifying education means thinking in the opposite direction. It means starting with the assumption that learning is boring and stupid and that we must somehow change it, shapeshift, contort it until it resembles a game so that children will have fun.
Instead, if you actually educate well and meaningfully, the fun will follow. The problem solving and overcoming of challenges is the game part. Learning is a game.
The issue is really that our educational system does not actually teach you anything amd/or does not use the proper methods for it. If children actually learned something valuable every day, in the best possible way for our brains, they’d all love to go. I am sure of it. Because going has the reward of fun and accomplishment, because they know they get their money’s worth and they will learn and grow.
Sitting still and listening to someone talk is a terrible way to learn. Reading a book or watching a video is not much better. Doing low-grade clerical work for hours every day (otherwise called “homework”) is not an effective way to learn. Testing if someone has grown and progressed using written tests is not an effective way to test.
So, then, if the educational system isn’t actually helping their students learn, then of course they’re not going to have fun. Of course they’re going to be bored or zoned out. “Gamifying” the process usually just makes it worse: it puts effort into the wrong thing and confirms to everyone that they were right about school sucking. If teachers need to go out of their way to present material like a game, then surely it was boring to begin with?
Yes, I am a game developer. I know many ways to gamify something and I’ve seen the effectiveness of certain mechanics often used in games (to teach you the rules quickly and intuitively) first-hand many times. But I’d still never recommend “gamifying” education, at least not in the way people usually mean.
Instead, the educational system should 100% focus on the techniques and systems that actually optimize learning, problem solving and overcoming challenges. If they do that, they’ll find the problems disappear. And they’ll find they have, more subtly and effectively than otherwise, turned learning into one huge game anyway.
It will still be hard sometimes. As I explained: it has to be. As I also explained: this is not an issue. Hard things lead to fun. Hard things lead to growth and the feeling of accomplishment. Playing a complex video game well is often the hardest thing a child can do during their day, yet they still have fun and try again tomorrow.
A specific example: flow
To finish off this article, though, I want to make this a bit more specific. I want to introduce something very important in the field of game design, which I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and have concluded applies to life in general.
It’s the idea of flow.
When game design just became a thing, there was this theory that a good game should have flow.
More and more, there’s a general concensus that it’s even simpler: flow = fun. It’s not a component, not a nice-to-have, it’s the thing that motivates us to do stuff and have fun.
So what is it?
Game designers usually define it like this: “You enter a state of flow if you’re being challenged in a balanced way. The challenge presented is not too easy for you—or you’d be bored—but also not too hard—or you’d give up.”
When designing a game, you’re really performing a highwire act. Balancing these two extremes to keep the player in flow. Anything that makes it too hard is overwhelming. But equally, anything that makes it too easy will make it boring and not worth playing.
Other creatives, such as musicians and painters, usually define it like this: “Flow is the absence of thought.”
You do your absolute best work when you’re “in the flow”. When your brain seems shut off, that second voice everyone has inside of them is not interrupting, and you just do stuff. You’re in the flow, you’re making decisions intuitively, you’re smashing paint strokes onto a canvas and before you know it 10 hours have flown by and you have a pretty painting.
I think everyone who has ever met challenges head-on will recognize this feeling. It is the best feeling. It is as if your body and mind are finally one, as if you’ve opened yourself to your full understanding and skill. You can be far more productive, far more creative, far more experimental, and it all works out.
When in the flow, you are able to both have fun and be productive. You’re able to both grow a lot from what you’re doing and do it quickly and with minimal effort.
I think the educational system should be designed to induce flow as much as possible.
Students should be able to pick the challenge that interests them but is not too hard. All the extra rules, regulations, and useless dead weight should be removed as it yanks students out of the flow.
If a challenge is currently too hard for someone, they should be allowed to just scale back. Forcing them to stay within the curriculum or get a certain grade at the next test will not actually teach them anything. It will destroy their flow and make them give up.
Similarly, if school is not challenging enough for someone, there should be ample ways to ramp it up. Forcing people to stay within the curriculum, again, will only do harm.
I am an example of that. Even as a child, I learned verociously. I wanted to know everything, read books before I was taught how to read, and so forth. School didn’t know what to do with me. They were annoyed at me (and my parents) and kept forcing me to stay in line and do exactly as prescribed.
The result? You know it. I stopped paying attention at school, stopped being interested, my grades dropped, I hated every second there. And I LOVED learning; still do!
Whenever school thinks they must create a rule, or punish a student, or be strict about something, it should ask itself: “Does this interrupt or enhance the student’s flow?”
As expected, anything that interrupts should never be done. Any enhancements are more than welcome.
Anything that would sow doubt or fear or insecurity into the minds of students should go away. We don’t want them to overthink. We don’t want them stuck in their heads all day. Conscious thought, tackling learning purely with your thoughts, is actually the worst way to do it.
Because when a student is in flow, they’ll go to school, they’ll have a good time, and they’ll learn as much as they can. And they’ll do it all while feeling good and satisfied, even though the challenges they faced every day were really hard.
Conclusion
Anyway, those were my thoughts about the topic. I really just used this common debate about education and gamifying it as a springboard for my point about flow. I thought I could be sneaky, but nah.
Once I realized this, my productivity and learning skyrocketed. I was able to achieve more, learn more, grow more, while actually working less and feeling less stressed.
When I am in the flow, I can work for hours and tackle really hard challenges. And then, when done, I am satisfied and sleep well.
That’s a far cry from how I was as a child. I remember that I could barely sleep a few hours each night. That’s how much I was “in my head”.
And then, as I got older, I was always stressed and always “working”, because I thought I had to be more productive and learn myself new skills. What I didn’t realize was how much energy and time was wasted there, because my habits and environment actually pulled me out of flow all the time. For several years, mostly at university, I was basically permanently out of flow. And in that situation, all the discipline and IQ in the world will not actually help you progress.
I just think it’s incredibly valuable to design your habits to make your life flow.
- Always keep things challenging and interesting, without making it too hard or overwhelming.
- Stop thinking; do.
- When you’re demotivated, it’s a sign you are bored. Increase the challenge (but not too much).
- When you’re tired or frozen, it’s a sign you are overworked. Reduce the challenge (but not too much).
- Stop thinking; do, do some more, don’t let thought get in the way of learning.
When I say this, parents obviously look at me all shocked and in disbelief. How could I tell children to stop thinking!? Surely people are not using their brains enough! School is all about putting thoughts inside those malleable child brains!
When I say thought, you should interpret it as conscious thoughts or interrupting thoughts. Things that actively make you stop, or make you doubt, or make you hesitate before doing something. It’s when thought overrules everything else and makes the decisions, not your instinct, or your experience, or your hands itching to do something. When an artist is in the flow, they are obviously still using their brain and doing intelligent stuff.
I just hope that the pile of proof I provide will be enough to convince some people. My portfolio is filled with projects made using these ideas, made “in flow”, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to call them dumb or unintelligent.
Heck, this article was written “in flow”, as are most on this blog. I started with a general idea I wanted to get out, then I just started typing … and now we’re here. No, I didn’t let thoughts interrupt or freeze me. No, I don’t know the time or how long I’ve been writing. No, there was no plan.
I entered the flow, I used it to learn, make, experiment, and complete a task, and now we’re here.
Pick up a good book on Flow. Pick simple and easy habits to design your life around it. Teach your kids to ignore school’s demonstrably ineffective ideas and instead enter a flow of learning and experimentation. That way, all of life becomes a game: both fun and instructive, both interesting and educating, all the time.
Tiamo