Neighborhoods and Motivation

I was watching my class explore some of the interactive maps on a fun and informative website called Click-that-'Hood and I came back to some questions about teaching and learning that are always somewhere in the back of my mind.  What makes a given learning experience meaningful? Where does the motivation to learn and figure something out come from?  Why are games so engaging? 

The map games on the site are very simple and elegantly laid out.  You see a map of a given area with unmarked neighborhood boundary lines. A timer starts running at the bottom of the page.  The names of the different neighborhoods appear at the top of the screen.  If you click on the corresponding zone on the map, another name pops up and so on.  It's a simple game.  Students were really into it and they are learning the names and locations of Portland neighborhoods.  This kind of "gamification" makes memorization fun and lasting.  It is learning they can apply across contexts and they are motivated to learn it for its own sake.  

There are other aspects of gamification in online learning environments that I find less effective and even counterproductive - rewards.  Badges can be a great way to keep track of skills you have mastered or performed in an online environment. Multiplied double digits? Multiplication badge.  Built a cool rocket out of cardboard?  Engineer badge.  Made some helpful comments on a friend's blog.  Blogger badge.  That is making learning visible within a community.  

But the mechanics get weird and Pavlovian when badges and points become part of a competition or reward system.  Some websites design their learning where students can earn game time for completing drills or answering questions correctly. In my experience the learning there is diminished - less meaningful or memorable - because of the skewed motivational scheme.  It works against inherent desires to learn and grow and understand. To quote Alfie Kohn, 

Research and logic suggest that punishment and rewards are not really opposites, but two sides of the same coin. Both strategies amount to ways of trying to manipulate someone’s behavior–in one case, prompting the question, “What do they want me to do, and what happens to me if I don’t do it?”, and in the other instance, leading a child to ask, “What do they want me to do, and what do I get for doing it?” Neither strategy helps children to grapple with the question, “What kind of person do I want to be?”

It's this last question that lingers longest in my mind.  It's not just about what we teach, or how we teach; it's always about how the learning shapes who we are.  This article by Katie Ray, a brilliant thinker about teaching young writers, has some great examples of what the implications are for students when we start to think about identity and "stance" in relation to learning.  It creates "students who are prepared to meet the demands of writing in a world with constantly evolving conventions and expectations, because what they know about writing is not static; they’ve learned how to learn about writing."

Don't get me wrong, though.  I love playing games where someone wins and someone loses.  But those are games that I am playing for the sake of playing, not for learning another concept altogether.  I win and lose at soccer and bridge and Mario 3D world all the time.  It's fun.  

This is a long way from the click-that-hood game where I started, but it was on my mind while I watched the kids play around with it.  What would have been the effect if they were playing for points, or rewards or against each other?  Who would have felt successful?  Who would have felt left out?  Who would have missed the learning for the earning?