It’s not what you think. This is not about teaching and learning through playing World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. Rather, this model uses teaching strategies based on the design-concepts of video games and research on how the brain responds during video games. This week will introduce the concepts, and next week we’ll make the connection to applying this to the classroom.
Video games are motivating! The driving force behind this is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that produces feelings of great pleasure when more than the usual amount is released. When the brain makes a successful prediction or behavioral response, this triggers a feel-good release of dopamine, which causes the brain to want to repeat the action. The key is that there must be some challenge or risk – a chance of being unsuccessful – in order for this dopamine reward to take place. Doing something that is a “sure thing” or unchallenging does not bring about this chemical reward.
Video games are a series of opportunities to make predictions and choices that the player acts upon. Players receive frequent feedback as to how they’re doing – points, sounds, tokens, etc. They are immediately aware of their successes. With each success, there are repeated hits of dopamine with an even larger surge when a player has successfully completed a level and gets to move on to the next one. The brain pushes the player to continue in the hopes of further challenges and more hits of dopamine. The neural pathways in the brain that brought about that success and dopamine response are reinforced, becoming stronger and more durable.
What’s the right level of challenge for a player? There needs to be an actual challenge in order to get the dopamine reward, but it also can’t be so difficult that the expectation of success is slim. Think of it as the “Goldilocks challenge” – just right. The results of fMRI studies show that the brain evaluates the likelihood of success of a cognitive task before expending the effort to attempt to solve the task. Only when the brain perceives that there is a reasonable chance at success, will the dopamine response be activated.
Video games have levels that the player must progress through. A player will move quickly through the levels at which he’s already skilled. Once the player reaches the “just right” level, the fun begins. Players make errors (unsuccessful predictions or actions) 80% of the time (in fact the games are designed this way), however players are given just enough hints or some other type of feedback to help maintain the expectation of possible success and therefore sustain interest in continuing to play. Once a level is mastered, the player must be challenged with more difficult tasks because once a skill is achieved, there will be no dopamine reward for successful completion of that skill. Therefore, increased challenges (i.e., the next level of the game) are sought out in order to maintain this reward.
The adolescent brain needs more frequent dopamine hits than the adult brain (the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until age 25-30) in order to stay motivated through challenges. It makes sense then that the design of video games can be an excellent model for addressing other types of challenges as well. Next week, we’ll look at how these concepts can be transferred from the video game model to teaching applications.
