Originally posted at Gamelier.

I’m not accustomed to reading philosophy, but really enjoyed reading Experience and Education, by John Dewey. It’s a slim book of not even 100 pages, but is beautifully written, exceptionally clear and intelligent.

Experience and Education was written in 1938 as a followup to an earlier book, Democracy and Education, which he had written in 1916. It’s incredible to me that already at that time there was the notion of the “progressive” vs “traditional” education. Progressive education includes learning by doing, problem solving, working in groups, and personalizing education to fit the student, among other things. Interestingly, Dewey frames these schools of educational thought in reference to systems of government. The traditional schools were autocratic, the progressive schools democratic.

Dewey starts Experience and Education by stressing the need for an “educational philosophy” based on experience. I gather that he fears a backlash from the traditional viewpoint that sees the progressive schools as disorganized and lax. He points out that creating a school around a rejection of previous ideas is not the same as beating a viable new path. The book lays out the foundations for such a philosophy. Dewey places “experience” at the center because he sees education in general as a series of experiences, each of which changes the person experiencing them, impacting what experiences the person will seek or avoid in the future, and what they will learn from them. Certain experiences can stimulate growth, widening the possibilities for the person, whereas others can stunt growth, making them avoid whole areas of potential experience.

This reminds me of James Paul Gee’s description of a “damaged learner” in What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Once damaged by a bad experience in a school subject, which made the student feel overwhelmed and bored, the student could be put off the subject whenever possible, and even build their self-image upon a rejection of the subject.

Next, Dewey discusses how discipline in schools comes down to the social context of the environment. As Dewey says: “The [traditional] school was not a group or community held together by participation in common activities. Consequently, the normal, proper conditions of control were lacking. Their absence was made up for … by the direct intervention of the teacher, who ‘kept order’. [In the new schools], the primary source of social control resides in the very nature of the work being done as a social enterprise in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute and to which all feel a responsibility.” Once again, this sounds to me much like how Lee Sheldon sees the teacher’s role as a “dungeon master” in The Multiplayer Classroom, organizing opportunities for learning rather than directly passing on ideas to students.

And yet, not just any kind of communal experience will do. The later chapters of Experience and Education expound on the meanings that Dewey attaches to “freedom” and “purpose”. For Dewey, the kind of freedom that should be prized in schools is not the ability to do whatever one desires at a particular time, but rather the “power to frame purposes, to judge wisely, to evaluate desires by the consequences which will result from acting upon them”. In short, the power for students to fix goals and set out concrete steps to achieve them.

Finally, Dewey points out the connections between the experimental method in science and the progressive model of education. In science, ideas are not simply received as final truths, but tested as hypotheses. Experiments are carefully designed, observed, recorded, and analyzed. Once again, playing games can also be seen as performing the scientific method in miniature, though most often players do so informally.

With the excitement and activity of A-MAZE calming down, I finally have a moment to write about a rich book that I will want to read again and again- Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology by Valentino Braitenberg. Since it was written in 1984, I’m truly lucky that a colleague from the Gamelier recommended it to me, or else I doubt I would have ever discovered it.

The principle of “Synthetic Psychology” invoked in the title is that relatively simple machines can exhibit complex behavior that we would classify as “living”, “instinctive” ,” willful”, “smart”, “attentive”, etc. The author does this by setting up a series of thought experiments. He begins with a “vehicle” with a single motor activated by a sensor that is attuned to the temperature of its immediate surroundings.

Things get immediately more interesting in the next example, where a vehicle has a motor and a sensor on both sides. Depending how the connections are made between the motors and sensors (same side or crossed), and whether the connection is positive or negative, the vehicles would circle a source of heat, charge right at it, run away from it.

This is only the beginning. Each chapter introduces new layers of complexity into these simple vehicles and then explores how the vehicles would behave in such and such circumstances. He explores non-linear activation, thresholds, connections networks, selection, resistant connections, and many others. Some of these concepts reminded me of the little I learned about neural networks in school, but the author explains each wrinkle gently enough that I don’t believe any prior knowledge is necessary to enjoy it.

Ultimately, the book nicely sidesteps the question of “intelligence” that pollutes common discussions of artificial intelligence. By the time you are in the middle of the book, you have to admit that the machines behave in a way that you only associate with living things, and yet they are made only of sensors, motors, and wire.

The appendix to the book is filled with biological references for the mechanisms introduced as purely mechanical. Given that the book is now 30 years old, It would be interesting to know what new has been discovered since then.

Oh, and there are lovely line drawings placed in the middle of the book that evoke faraway worlds and fantastic machines. This reminds me of what an incredible video game it would make, especially the complex “social” aspects of having a world of such vehicles!

Cross-posted from the Gamelier. 

“What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy” is a book about how video games motivate players to learn how to play them, despite or even due to their complexity and difficulty. James Paul Gee compares how players learn video games to how people learn in school, and discusses how schools and other learning environments would benefit from imitating these aspects of video games.

In that way, the book reminds me of Jane McGonigal’s “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”, which also takes the tack of discussing how video games motivate players to take on difficult challenges, with the idea of applying these tactics to other domains (see my review of Reality is Broken). One difference is that where McGonigal focuses on forming personal habits (like weight loss or cleaning the house), James Paul Gee is more interested in school learning.

For me, the most interesting sections of this book dealt with the importance of identity. James Paul Gee argues that learners take on an identity with regards to a field of study. The identity can very well be positive- someone who is good at the subject, who learns quickly, performs well, etc. But they just as easily be negative, in which case the learner will be scared and put off by taking on the subject in the future. The author says that such a learner is “damaged”, and that such damage is difficult and time-consuming to repair.

This rings true of my own experience. I always did fine in school, but definitely formed negative relationships with certain subjects. In particular, despite five years of studying Spanish in junior-high and high school, I never really learned enough to converse. I therefore decided that I was a “language idiot”, and that I was forever handicapped in that area. I suppose that this demission was comforting, since it meant I didn’t have to try. When I ended up in France, it was so frustrating to not be able to understand and relate to those around me that I was extremely motived to learn. And the reality is that I can learn languages just fine. I still wouldn’t say that I’m “talented” in languages, but putting in hard work over a long enough period of time is likely the secret to learn anything at all.

The author show how the notion of identity extends to the people who work in the field. For example, doing science effectively makes the learner a scientist. The closer the learner associates themselves with the values of a scientist, the easier this learning becomes. Once again, the opposite is also true. A person could be easily put off a field by not wishing to associate themselves with the a negative identity they associate with it.

This now makes a few books that I’ve read which make this argument that school teaching techniques should import game design principles. But though I accept that video games mentioned do teach something, and may teach them very well, it is hard to find an example of an existing game that teaches something of value outside the game itself (besides side-benefits such as hand-eye coordination, willingness to experiment, or positive self-esteem). May it be that not enough games are built around real systems? Or is it fundamentally harder to get people to play a game about physics or language than it is to get them to jump on platforms, associate colors, and aim at zombies? Could it be that games mostly motivate people to learn intuitively, and not formally? Is school just not playful enough, or is it just harder to make certain subjects both playful and meaningful at the same time?

Ultimately, both educators and game designers are asking a person to invest their time and effort. If you don’t believe that the benefits are worth the investment, than why put in the time? Many (perhaps most) games offer some kind of immediate benefits of pleasure, both spectacular and of solving problems. Could school subjects offer the same?

Crossposted from the Gamelier