The Classroom of Popular Culture

What video games can teach us about making students want to learn
by James Paul Gee

Key points:

• Under to subtitle Producers, Not Consumers, Gee talks about good game designers letting players "be producers, not just consumers". This could mean letting the player alter the game so that it fits his/her knowledge level (tutorial, beginner, intermediate, advances, etc.), and letting the player solve problems in several different ways.
• "In good video games problems are well ordered, so that early ones lead the player to formulate hypotheses that work well for solving later, harder problems. " Leaving the user completely free to solve a difficult problem might help them generate a creative solution, but won't provide them with a good hypotheses for generating future code.
• Get the player to think about how each step they take might affect their future actions. I think this principle is important for our game because of the material we are presenting. We must have the player constantly thinking about how a certain assignment would affect a location in memory, and how that assignment affects other variables and data.