Gee. 2005. Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines


This article claims that game designers make games engaging through incorporating principles of learning that are often not found in schools and it argues that these principles should be integrated but first school needs to change.

The author made this argument by stating the learning principle and explaining how it is beneficial in the learning process. He then described how this principle is found in games and how it makes the game more engaging. After describing how it appears in games, examples were provided of specific games that did a good job in incorporating this principle. The last thing he did was state whether or not this principle could be found in schools and how it could be integrated. Some detail was provided in how the integration of this principle would benefit the students as well as what the lack of this principle entails for the learning experience.There were thirteen principles split up under the headings of “Empowered Learners”, “Problem Solving” and “Understanding”. Under the heading of “Empowered Learners” the principles co-design, customize, identity, and manipulation and distributed knowledge were explored. Under “Problem Solving” was well-ordered problems, pleasantly frustrating, cycles of expertise, information “on demand” and “just in time”, fish tanks, sandboxes, and skills as strategies. Lastly, under “Understanding” was system thinking and meaning as action image.

This compares to the article Playing Video Games: Learning and Information Literacy because both stated that learning in video games is often an unconscious process. It also compares well to Games People Play: How Video Games Improve Probabilistic Learning because it is argued that video games are useful tools in the learning process.

There were no keywords listed for this article. Some useful articles that were listed were:

Barsalou, L.W. (1999b) Perceptual Symbol Systems, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, pp. 577–660.

Bereiter, C., Scardamalia, M. (1993) Surpassing Ourselves: An inquiry into the nature and implications of expertise. Chicago: Open Court.

Chall, J.S., Jacobs, V., Baldwin, L. (1990) The Reading Crisis: Why poor children fall behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Clark, A. (1989) Microcognition: Philosophy, cognitive science, and parallel distributed processing. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Clark, A. (1997) Being There: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Clark, A. (2003) Natural-born Cyborgs: Why minds and technologies are made to merge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

diSessa, A.A. (2000) Changing Minds: Computers, learning, and literacy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Elman, J. (1991a) Distributed Representations, Simple Recurrent Networks and Grammatical Structure, Machine Learning, 7, pp. 195–225.

Gee, J.P. (1992) The Social Mind: Language, ideology, and social practice. New York: Bergin & Garvey.

Gee, J.P. (2003) What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan

Gee, J.P. (2004) Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling. London: Routledge.

Glenberg, A.M., Robertson, D.A. (1999) Indexical Understanding of Instructions, Discourse Processes, 28, pp. 1–26

Kelly, K. (1994) Out of Control: The new biology of machines, social systems, and the economic world. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

The questions this article raises for me are:

Why aren’t many of these practices used in schools?

Why are schools so resistant to change?

What needs to be done to change schools in order to better help the students?

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