My name is Paul Fuller. I am 33 years old. And I love playing Guitar Hero.
I admit it. I am hooked. So are all of my friends and millions of others around the world. We play Guitar Hero for hours, desperately trying to make our fingers move fast enough to unlock the next song or move up to a new level of rock godliness.
I am aware that this is somewhat pathetic. As far as I know, the ability to play Guitar Hero has no practical application in the real world. No matter how skilful I may become at this game, it remains highly unlikely that hordes of adoring fans will flock to admire my guitar-slinging.
Yet I remain incredibly motivated to learn how to play.
Why is this? And, perhaps more importantly, how can we assist students to feel this same level of motivation for the truly important learning that we seek to promote in our schools?
I believe that schools can learn some valuable lessons from games like Guitar Hero. (Here, I must admit my debt to Marc Prensky whose writings on game-based learning have influenced much of my thinking in this area).
So, here are the five things that I think our schools can learn from Guitar Hero.
1. Give them immediate feedback
In our schools, feedback generally works like this. The student spends a week writing a report. The teacher spends a week marking it. Feedback is provided in the form of a grade and perhaps a short comment. By the time the student receives the feedback, it is far too late for it to have any meaningful impact on the learning process.
Guitar Hero, on the other hand, provides immediate feedback (no pun intended). When you miss a note, the guitar makes a horrible clanging sound. Miss enough notes and the crowd boos you off stage. Strangely enough, all of the educational research indicates that the Guitar Hero system of instantaneous feedback provides the superior framework for learning.
To be fair, it is difficult to provide immediate feedback in a classroom situation with one teacher and thirty students. However, creative teachers have always got around this problem using teachers aides, parent helpers and peer tutors.
Nowadays, classroom technology provides yet another way of providing students with instant feedback. For example, computer spell-checkers are no longer the ‘tool of the devil’ that many teachers once considered them to be. Rather, by highlighting incorrectly-spelled words in real-time, they provide exactly the sort of immediate feedback that Guitar Hero recommends.
2. Everyone wants to be a hero.
Everyone wants to succeed. Guitar Hero knows this. When you complete a song, the words ‘Rock God!’ flash up on the screen and the crowd cheers you on. You earn cash that can be used to unlock new and more challenging songs.
Where in our schools can students feel this sort of success? For some, the sporting field provides this opportunity. But for most, our systems of reporting simply make a point of highlighting just how many people out there are better than you.
Don’t get me wrong. This does not mean our school system should make the mistake of issuing large helpings of false praise. Remember, you can still get booed off stage in Guitar Hero! However, what Guitar Hero teaches us is that success comes from challenging yourself and learning something new —- not from being better than others.
3. Make it difficult
Guitar Hero is not easy. To succeed on the advanced levels requires many hundreds of hours of practice. Any adult who questions the attention span or persistence of today’s youth should spend a few hours watching them play this game.
We need to make our curriculum challenging, full of rich tasks that will extend the minds of our young charges. A child’s ability to learn is phenomenal, just so long as his or her natural love of learning can remain intact.
4. …. but not too difficult
Guitar Hero guides the player to find a level that is challenging yet achievable. Success is always within reach but never without effort. Sound familiar? This is what developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky calls the ‘zone of proximal development’, the place where effective learning can take place.
Unfortunately, many schools seem to assume that, simply because a child is a certain age, a particular textbook must be right for them. This is increasingly the case in Western Australia where ‘outcomes-based education’ seems to now be a dirty word. The problem is that regular textbooks don’t provide immediate feedback and can’t adjust the difficulty level. A system such as Mathletics, on the other hand, can do this. I know which approach my students enjoy more.
5. Make it fun
A newborn child makes no distinction between work and play. All play is learning. All learning is play.
Somewhere along the line, however, we start telling children that learning isn’t fun. It’s work. And work is something that you do because you have to, not because you want to. This is the point where so many of our children fall out of love with learning.
Guitar Hero, on the other hand, is a game. It’s fun. You play it. Grown-ups will tell you that it’s a waste of time which, of course, simply makes it more enjoyable.
Mitch Resnick from MIT has written at length about the idea of ‘lifelong kindergarten’. He believes that truly successful people somehow manage to retain a childlike sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. They love to learn and constantly ‘play’ with ideas to come up with creative solutions to problems.
Resnick believes that the greatest learning occurs when students engage in activities that could be classed as ‘hard fun’. Perhaps not surprisingly, Guitar Hero falls squarely into this category. Other ‘hard fun’ activities with more traditional educational outcomes could include editing the school newspaper, building robots with Lego Mindstorms or designing a computer game using MIT’s own Scratch program.
Have I uncovered anything revolutionary here? Not at all. These are timeless principles that have underpinned good educational practice for many years.
But here’s the thing. Video game designers apply these principles far more effectively than teachers do. They engage and motivate students in a way that most teachers could never dream of.
So perhaps we teachers can learn something from the video game designers. Instead of complaining that ‘kids these days only want to play Nintendo’, maybe we should get out there and play right along with them. We just might learn something about good educational practice along the way.
Are you ready? Rock on!
(first posted at www.paulfuller.com.au)
