Gaming, cognition and education

Scott McLeod has been running a series of very substantial posts based, in part, on James Gee’s work, that explores what is being learned about learning from video-gaming.

His primary question? "Why is it that kids who can’t sit still in class for five minutes can be mentally locked in for hours at home playing video games?" His answers are spread out over the week, and linked to this post, but here's the quick summary of key things they've learned about why gaming models can be so effective pedagogically. Such learning models support: active learning, risk-taking, engaging; amplification of input, rewards, lots of practice; ongoing learning, regime of competence, probing; multiple routes to success, contextualized meaning, multimodal learning; and, subset of real domain, bottom-up basic skills, and just-in-time information.