Learning Conversations

I attended the quirky, but interesting Be Bettr conference a couple of weeks ago.

The most fascinating presentation (of the ones I watched) was that from Mohit Midha, who heads up Blue Duck Education, which produces Mangahigh.com

MangaHigh is "one of the world’s first games-based-learning sites, where students learn Mathematics via purpose-built casual games that balance fun and learning."

Let me expand on that, and we'll see how (or if) their ideas can be translated into adult learning.

First, I'll try to give you a flavour of what MangaHigh does for the student and for the teacher.

The games within MangaHigh have a number of key characteristics:

1. They are simple, usually based around a single task or activity.
2. The are first and foremost MATHS. They are chock full of maths content.
3. They are adaptive. If you do well, they get harder, and vice versa.
4. They contain context-sensitive help which provides the knowledge required at the point of need. (Just like Cathy Moore's Action Mapping model)

So the games themselves are educationally highly effective. But it's the system around the games (the platform) that really adds the value.

1. It allows students from the same school to compete against each other to get to the top of the leader board.
2. It allows schools in the same region to compete against each other
3. Teachers set individual targets (Bronze, Silver or Gold medals) for specific groups of children within a particular game that covers the current topic (ie. differentiation)
4. Teachers can monitor students' progress using a graph that shows the number of attempts against achievement.

So, what have they found?

1. Kids love it. They frequently spend far more time on the allocated game than they have to. So students who have been set a Bronze target are achieving Silver, or even Gold.
2. Teachers love it. Instead of spending hours marking exercises, teachers are able to focus on helping individual students where they are struggling, or challenging students who need an extra push.

Leaving aside the benefits to the education sector, how can these ideas impact on adult learning?

I would argue that, in an ideal world, simulations and games which are adaptive, competitive and supportive are a fabulous learning environment. You can see them in high-risk training situations like piloting an aeroplane.

It's not necessarily the investment to create the games that is the issue (although it does increase exponentially the more variables you have to consider). The thing that is the blocker for me is learner time.

In a normal working situation, most managers will want their employees to have enough of the right knowledge, skills and behaviours to get started and then the rest is learnt on the job. Most people just wouldn't be able to justify the amount of time that a child will spend on a game to become an expert.

So, when learning is an essential pre-requisite to a job, games and simulations provide a valuable approach. When learning is just part of the job (as it is for most of us) then games and simulations will rarely be the right answer - unless they can be time-limited (eg. simulating a phone conversation for customer service training)

However, what we can learn from games is the way they support their players through guidance at the point of need. It might be guidance on how to just get through that particular problem, or guidance on how to approach a problem in a different way, or use a tool more efficiently.

The thing that we must remember, as workplace learning professionals, is that learning is rarely the reason people are doing the jobs. And it's almost certainly never the reason that the job exists in the first place. Learning interventions should always be subservient to performance, yet, at the same time learning should be a natural result of improved performance.