In the 2016 AMATYC keynote, I covered three main themes:

  1. Interaction & Impasse (last post)
  2. Challenge & Curiosity (this post)
  3. Durable Learning

Here are references and resources for Challenge & Curiosity:

First, I have to point you to one of my favorite books on the subject, A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by Raph Koster.

Quote from Game Design: “How do I get somebody to learn something that is long and difficult and takes a lot of commitment, but get them to learn it well?” – James Gee

How do players learn a game? 

  • They give it a try
  • They push at boundaries
  • They try over and over
  • They seek patterns

It looks something like this:

Shows web of many nodes and branches coming off a person, with bridges between branches and potential paths to expand knowledge.

How does a player learn a game?

How do we teach students?

  • We tell them what we’re going to tell them.
  • We tell them.
  • We tell them what we told them.
  • We have them practice repetitively.

It looks something like this:

Very few linear paths branching out from the person at the center. Few nodes and few places to expand on knowledge.

How do we teach students?

Reference: Productive Failure in Mathematical Problem Solving

There’s a much wider body of research on productive failure worth reading.

Video: Playing to Learn Math

Resource: Good Questions from Cornell

Resource: Classroom Voting Questions from Carroll College

Design more activities that let the student figure out the mathematical puzzle, instead of providing all the secrets yourself.

Shows the graph of a rational function with vertical asymptote at x=5 and horizontal asymptote at y=2.

Explain the differences in the graphs: The student is given five rational functions to graph, each function looks only slightly different mathematically but produces very different results.