This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: Teaching and learning with games Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

I have a particular fondness for games, and they work particularly well in my experience both as a learner and as a trainer. In the former capacity I particularly enjoyed Senge's Beer Game, Deming's Red Beads Game, a similar game of Jerry Weinberg's called the Quality Game (see here), and am looking forward to the XP Game; in the latter capacity, among others I ran a fun thing now called "Forty-nine minutes inside the Fridge", inspired by Dietrich Dörner's book The Logic of Failure.

The downside of games is that it can take a lot of effort to frame as a game something that you want to teach, as opposed to, say, a bunch of Powerpoint slides. You have to work out rules, scoring, timing, allowable numbers of participants, material such as tokens, cards etc. If you can spare the time and effort, though, dreaming up a game is well worth the effort.

Why do games work ? When used appropriately, games are a sub-category of experiential training. Experiential learning puts the learner in charge of tailoring the content to his or her needs and background, rather than the teacher or trainer. This contrasts with the "transfer of knowledge" approach, in which an expert attempts to "pour" the substance of her knowledge into the the student's head, mostly intact, or at least with modifications largely under the expert's control.

When the material taught applies to unique and complex situations (such as software development projects), such "tailoring" according to the student's special needs and particular background becomes ever more important. The experiential approach is a better fit in these cases than the "knowledge transfer" approach.

An important idea in experiential training is that there needn't be One Correct Answer to every question; rather, the process of coming up with an answer that fits the situation is the richest part of any learning activity.

Games exhibit these two elements, usually to a high degree: there usually is more than one correct "move" in any given situation, though of course some moves are more correct - or more skillful - than others. Players exhibit their mastery of the situation over a sequence of moves and not by a single move. This makes games a good fit for training that is designed to be experiential.

The tailoring of content in experiential learning happens through reflection on experience. "Students" do something, then think back on what happened for them while doing. They formulate various explanations for whatever happened that surprised them. This usually leads to improved mastery over the situations to which the training is relevant.

What distinguishes experiential training, explicitly offered as such, from everyday work (or life) is that the trainer provides a context which is particularly rich in opportunities to be surprised, and which sets apart explicit periods for reflection. The trainer also provides safety from ridicule, because we are often at our most ridiculous while learning new things.

One possible problem with experiential training is that you can't always just say, "Let's sit down and do something, then see what we've learned from it". People are rarely comfortable with this little structure. Framing an experiential learning activity as a game provides more structure, and provides an incentive for going through the various activities involved. Games are a socially acceptable pretext for the requisite "suspension of seriousness".