Chapter 4: Motivation
How to Get Everyone in the Learning Game
It's All About Gaming as Motivation
According to Vander Ark, instant feedback from learning games, simulations, and virtual environments will be widely used, resulting in more persistence and time on task. There are seven ways games reward the brain to motivate learning: continuous grading, multiple long term and short term aims that are clearly identified, rewarding effort, feedback is immediate and continuous, element of uncertainty, finding windows of learning, and confidence. New games are adaptive in level of difficulty, finding students' instructional level, where they learn best, and offering enough challenge to get them learning.
"If we are committed to reaching and motivating all students and if we are committed to giving them the skills they need for a digital world, then we need to harness the power of learning games and engaging media."
According to Daphne Bavelier, "video gamers show improved skills in vision, attention and certain aspects of cognition. They perform better than non-gamers on certain tests of attention, speed, accuracy, vision and multi-tasking."