The 36 Learning Principles in “good” video games.
This is a list of learning principles that are built into good video games. The first five principles are very basic ones, since quite a number of other principles that are implicated in the earlier discussion are discussed in greater detail in the later principles.
The order of the principles is not important. All the principles are equally important, or nearly so. Some of the principles overlap and, in actuality, reflect different aspects of much the same general theme. Furthermore, these principles are not claims about all and any video games played in any old fashion.
Rather, they are claims about the potential of good video games played in environments that encourage overt reflection. (While good video games do indeed encourage overt reflection, this feature can be greatly enhanced by the presence of others, both players and viewers.)
Each principle is stated in a way that is intended to be equally relevant to learning in video games and learning in content areas in classrooms.
- Active, Critical Learning principle
All aspects of the learning environment (including the ways in which the semiotic domain is designed and presented) are set up to encourage active and critical, not passive, learning.
- Design Principle
Learning about and coming to appreciate design and design principles is core to the learning experience.
- Semiotic Principle
Learning about and coming to appreciate interrelations within and across multiple sign systems (images, words, actions, symbols, artifacts, etc) as a complex system is core to the learning experience.
- Semiotic Domains Principle
Learning involves mastering, at some level, semiotic domains, and being able to participate, at some level, in the affinity group or groups connected to them.
- Metalevel Thinking about Semiotic Domains Principle
Learning involves active and critical thinking about the relationship of the semiotic domain being learned to other semiotic domains.
- “Psychosocial Moratorium” Principle
Learners can take risks in a space where real-world consequences are lowered.
- Committed Learning Principle
Learners participate in an extended engagement (lots of effort and practice) as extensions of their real-world identities in relation to a virtual identity to which they feel some commitment and a virtual world that they find compelling.
- Identity Principle
Learning involves taking on and playing with identities in such a way that the learner has real choices (in developing the virtual identity) and ample opportunity to meditate on the relationship between new identities and old ones. There is a tripartite play of identities as learners relate, and reflect on, their multiple real-world identities, a virtual identity, and a projective identity.
- Self Knowledge Principle
The virtual world is constructed in such a way that learners learn not only about the domain but about themselves and their current potential capacities.
- Amplification of Input Principle
For little input, learners get a lot of output.
- Achievement Principle
For learners of all levels there are intrinsic rewards from the beginning, customised to each learner’s level, effort and growing mastery and signaling the learner’s ongoing achievements.
- Practice Principle
Learners get lots and lots of practice in a context where the practice is not boring (i.e. in a virtual world that is compelling to learners on their own terms and where the learners experience ongoing success). They spend lots of time on task.
- Ongoing Learning Principle
The distinction between learner and master is vague, since learners, thanks to the operation of the “regime of competence” principle listed next, must, at higher and higher levels, undo their routinised mastery to adapt to new or changed conditions. There are cycles of new learning, automisation, undoing automisation, and new re-organised automisation.
- “Regime of Competence” Principle.
The learner gets ample opportunity to operate within, but at the outer edge of, his or her resources, so that at those points things are felt as challenging but not “undoable”.
- Probing Principle
Learning is a cycle of probing the world (doing something); reflecting in and on this action and, on this basis, forming a hypothesis; reprobing the world to test this hypothesis; and then accepting or rethinking the hypothesis.
- Multiple Routes Principle
There are multiple ways to make progress or move ahead. This allows learners to make choices, rely on their own strengths and styles of learning and problem solving, while also exploring alternative styles.
- Situated Meaning Principle
The meanings of signs (words, actions, objects, artefacts, symbols, texts etc) are situated in embodied experience. Meanings are not general or decontextualised. Whatever generality meanings come to have is discovered bottom up via embodied experiences.
- Text principle
Texts are not understood purely verbally (i.e. only in terms of the definitions of the words in the text and their text-internal relationships to each other) but are understood in terms of embodied experiences. Learners move back and forth between texts and embodied experiences. More purely verbal understanding (reading texts apart from embodied action) comes only when learners have had enough embodied experience in the domain and ample experiences with similar texts.
- Intertextual Principle
The learner understands texts as a family (“genre”) of related texts and understands any one such text in relation to others in the family, but only after having achieved embodied understandings of some texts. Understanding a group of texts as a family (genre) of texts is a large part of what helps the learner make sense of such texts.
- Multimodal Principle
Meaning and knowledge are built up through various modalities (images, texts, symbols, interactions, abstract design, sound, etc), not just words.
- “Material Intelligence” Principle
Thinking, problem solving and knowledge are “stored” in material objects and the environment. This frees the learners to engage their minds with other things while combining the results of their own thinking with the knowledge stored in material objects and the environment to achieve yet more powerful effects.
- Intuitive Knowledge Principle
Intuitive or tacit knowledge built up in repeated practice and experience, often in association with an affinity group, counts a great deal and is honored. Not just verbal and conscious knowledge is rewarded.
- Subset Principle
Learning even at its start takes place in a (simplified) subset of the real domain.
- Incremental Principal
Learning situations are ordered in the early stages so that earlier cases lead to generalisations that are fruitful for later cases. When learners face more complex cases later, the learning space (the number and type of guesses the learner can make) is constrained by the sorts of fruitful patterns or generalisation the learner has found earlier.
- Concentrated Sample Principle
The learner sees, especially early on, many more instances of fundamental signs and actions than would be the case in a less controlled sample. Fundamental signs and actions are concentrated in the early stages so that learners get to practice them often and learn them well.
- Bottom-up Basic Skills Principle
Basic skills are not learned in isolation or out of context, rather, what counts as a basic skill is discovered bottom up by engaging in more and more of the game/domain or game/domains like it. Basic skills are genre elements of a given type of game/domain.
- Explicit Information On-Demand and Just-in-Tine Principle
The learner is given explicit information both on-demand and just-in-time, when the learner needs it or just at the point where the information can best be understood and used in practice.
- Discovery Principle
Overt telling is kept to a well-thought-out minimum, allowing ample opportunity for the learner to experiment and make discoveries.
- Transfer Principle
Learners are given ample opportunity to practice, and support for, transferring what they have learned earlier to later problems, including problems that require adapting and transforming that earlier learning.
- Cultural Models about the World Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about some of their cultural models regarding the world, without denigrations of their identities, abilities or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models that may conflict with or otherwise relate to them in various ways.
- Cultural Models about Learning Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models of learning and themselves as learners, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models of learning and themselves as learners.
- Cultural Models about Semiotic Domains Principle
Learning is set up in such a way that learners come to think consciously and reflectively about their cultural models about a particular semiotic domain they are learning, without denigration of their identities, abilities, or social affiliations, and juxtapose them to new models about this domain.
- Distributed Principle
Meaning/knowledge is distributed across the learner, objects, tools, symbols, technologies, and the environment.
- Dispersed Principle
Meaning/knowledge is dispersed in the sense that the learner shares it with others outside the domain/game, some of whom the learner may rarely or never see face to face.
35. Affinity Group Principle
Learners constitute an “affinity group”, that is, a group that is bonded primarily through shared endeavors, goals, and practices and not shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity or culture.
The learner is an “insider”, “teacher”, and “producer” (not just a “consumer”) able to customise the learning experience and domain/game from the beginning and throughout the experience.
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