Learning to Game and Gaming to Learn

According to James Paul Gee, " the theory of learning behind video games is quite different from how we learn in school." 

He indicates the best game learning is based on a learning system:

• which offers guidance, mentoring, smart tools, well designed and well organized problems, feedback, and language just in time and on demand
•  affords interest- and passion-driven learning in fan communities, interest-driven groups, or what I have elsewhere called “passionate affinity spaces"
•  both the game and its associated affinity spaces encourage and resource “modding”, that is, using tools to modify the game or facilitate one’s own learning or that of others
• that teaches learners to collaborate to solve hard problems and allow them to organize some of their own teaching and learning in terms of interests and passions they share with others.
• help learners develop crucial non-cognitive skills like being able to accept challenges, to persist past failure, and to fuel lots of practice through proactive effort and passion.

(Gee, 2013)

Video from here 



Gee (as cited in Sefton- Green, 2006, p. 300) advocates there is a "value that is transformative of individual capacities and identities."  Sefton-Green (p. 299) challenges educators to consider these new understandings of learning when analyzing young people's use of media culture and asks,

"Can the narratives of learning  that appear to underpin how young people work in these apparently distinctly different domains -- in school and not in school, at home and at play -- really be developed in ways that offer structural change across learning contexts?"

However he also adds until there is a political interest in such research, it will not reach across the "traditional impasse."

Individual teachers can apply their inquiry and their professional development to further develop pedagogical knowledge about how using Minecraft in a school setting can be engaging,  purposeful and supportive of teaching and learning. This has been carried out by a number of educators. 

Working from the assumption that digital games are integral to contemporary youth culture, Nerissa Monash (2015) wanted to explore Minecraft's potential for connecting outside- and inside- school literacy practices. Her study showed clearly how the girls' game play was shared across several digital technologies and social platforms:

Students construct hybrid text, not commonly constructed in conventional English   learning, by combining written and visual devices, including emoticons, to guide digital, 21st century readers – all of which may be interpreted as fancy in comparison to a traditional teaching context.   
(Monash, 2015, p. 72)

Farber (2016) posts in "Edutopia" that gamification in schools has tremendous immersive possibilities :
The games model causes that have effects, which have subsequent effects—thus the game teaches the 21st-century skill of systems thinking. 

This has ramifications for re-considering the teacher's less traditional role as students engage in a problem-solving, self-paced, responsive learning cycle. As students enter this cycle at different points for different purposes, it is clear there is a [diminished] change in the student-teacher dynamic.