flOw

Whoa… this was a medatative, zenlike game experience and if there is an embodiment of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow Theory, this is it. My brain feels massaged after playing this. The dynamic difficulty and intrinsic reward structure of the game makes it very addictive. It would be amazing if we could structure classes like this – small steps, intrinsic rewards and “authentic risk”. But with the current model of mass education, it will not likely come to pass for anything outside of graduate studies.

But if you think about grad studies as the pursuit of an academic hobby (an odd pursuit of pleasure for sure), one would likely not be stretching too far to think that any sort of hobby or life long learning pursuit has this flow like quality. If learning could be a hobby for everyone, I don’t think education would have any of the troubles that it has right now. But the problem is that it is not. We are still thinking that learning is a process that happens within the student as a result of an external process.

If we rethink education as being something that makes society better, rather than a means for gaining employment in a defined field, we might be onto something. We will be able to make changes to the tools that are used as they become relevant (take a look at the analogue/digital transition in photo/video/print) and keep students interested in moving forward to their own future, not a common future that they might not want to be part of.