Context-Embedded Learning Part II: Learning By Doing (Prensky and Gee)
This is part of the Context-Embedded Learning section of my dissertation lit review:
Modern video game scholars have argued that video and computer games can help provide such a context for learning. Prensky (2001), for instance, highlighted several relevant concepts; games have rules, goals, outcomes/feedback, conflict/competition/challenge/opposition, problem solving, interaction, representation, and story (p. 106), including character (p. 134, 118-127). Regarding goals specifically, Prensky suggests elsewhere that the goals must be “worthwhile” (2005a, p. 9), or specifically “worth it to [students]” (2005, p. 4), to be effective. When he covers game design, he considers the way in which a game must be balanced so that “the game is neither too hard nor too easy at any point” (Prensky, 2001, p. 133). A well-designed game, particularly an RPG or MMORPG, can also include elements of exploration and discovery as well (p. 136). In his projection of the future of digital games, Prensky (2001) predicts that games will be “much more realistic, experiential, and immersive” and include “more and better storytelling and characters” (p. 404).
Prensky later wrote about five levels of learning by doing. The first of these was the How level; as Prensky (2006) explained, “the most explicit kind of learning in video and computer games is how to do something” (p. 64). The second level is learning What to do (and what not to do) in any particular instance (p. 65). The third level of learning is the Why level; “strategy – the why of a game – depends on, and flows from, the rules” (p. 67). Why lessons include cause and effect, long term wining versus short term goals, order from seeming chaos, second-order consequences, complex system behaviors, counter intuitive results, using obstacles as motication, and the value of persistence (p. 67-68). The fourth level, Where “is the context level, [...]
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