Why isn't learning always fun? Why is it stressful, boring, and frustrating when it should be energizing and awe-inspiring?

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The answer lies in the way that learning is framed - from the goals of each course to their activities and assessments, education has the potential to make learning feel like a dread-inducing nightmare or an epic climb to victory.

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While the instructor's role is to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed, I strongly believe that a mastery of this ability to frame education in a motivating way is the single greatest investment teachers can use to improve their students' performance. This aspect of instructional design - a blend of science, art, and marketing - is profoundly complex and endlessly useful.

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Fortunately, there is a resource which, untapped by traditional education, has a wealth of insight into creating systems of motivated learning. This resource is game design, and it's counterpart gamification has taken the corporate sector by storm as businesses seek to apply its techniques to manifest productive behavior.

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Educational games, on the other hand, still have many steps to go. While several applications have seen games reinforce elementary topics such as arithmetic, pattern recognition, and language formation, there are still profound ways in which they can be applied for cognitive and affective development.

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This blog seeks to explore some of these applications and provide insights on the future of games in education, along with its corollary of gamification in the classroom. I am happy you are willing to join me on this journey, and would be delighted to discuss with you the potential for such ideas as the educational landscape begins to shift around us.

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Sincerely,

Nathan