Before reading the following blog please take a look at the video below and follow the instructions it gives. The selective attention test shows how, by focusing too intently on a thing, we block out other information. We select what we wish to pay attention to, and ignore other information. It works in conjunction with […]
The Sawyer Effect and Motivation
For those of you who don’t know the story of Tom Sawyer white washing the fence you can read it here. In the story Mark Twain demonstrates some features of motivation that are not normally thought about when teachers engage in classroom design. The first principle of the sawyer effect is that any activity can be made […]
Hard Fun
Have you ever done something where you looked up afterwards and thought “where has the time gone?”; an activity that you found incredibly challenging but fascinating at the same time, so much so that time and self stopped being important. If you have, then that activity could best be described as hard fun. Of the […]
Is Your Class A Game?
“People learn through play” is a statement that almost every teacher, psychologist, educational theorist and even politician can agree on. Play teaches a wide range of skills mostly in the area of procedural knowledge (how to do things) rather than declarative (how to explain things). It is an area that is under-served by the tell-then-test […]
Why Study Games?
In the academic world this question pops up fairly regularly. It stems from the view of games as pastimes and inconsequential in comparison to the more serious subjects out there. This view is so common that the field of Game Theory is linked to mathematics and philosophy, and has only the most basic reference to games […]
First Order Rules and Instruction
Teachers often struggle against becoming the “Sage on the Stage”. This post will look at one of the areas where the sage takes center stage frequently in teaching, the giving of instructions for activities. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn to do is not to over instruct. Over instruction is when […]
What’s Fun?
Fun is a word that we as teachers hear a lot. Whether it is from students who are moaning at the lack of it in the classroom, or peers bemoaning the focus of modern education on being fun. It is one of the words that is bandied around a lot, but it is also surprisingly difficult […]
3rd Space Learning
Does education have to take place in a formal school based environment? Is school truly the “Work of children”? In 1989 Ray Oldenburg proposed his theories of different space in his book The Great Good Place. The places were defined based on the amount of time that we spend in them. The first space was the home, the […]
Mind Mapping Conversations
The tip of the tongue phenomena is a killer. The words just seem to freeze in the brain and refuse to come out. It is a sudden reminder to us all that speaking is quite a complex process which involves constructing thoughts, grammar, and vocalizations, and fitting it all into the social context of the […]
Games and Activities
A presentation once asked the question, what is the difference between a game and an activity in an educational environment? The presenter went on to provide their own definition, one that obviously did not reflect a reading of The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits. An activity has pedagogical value, whereas a game is engaged in purely for […]
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