Katie Salen – Making Learning Irresistible: 6 Principles of Game-like Learning

The principles underlying a learning model that uses the intrinsic qualities of game design and play to reimagine what learning might look like for youth.

Key Questions and Comments:

• (23:40) When you’re encouraging failure so much…even in a safe place, does that affect their self-esteem and how do you make the trade-off there?
• (31:44) How do you situate your gameplay in regard to state standards? How do you deal with the unconvinced?
• (46:24) Something that we’ve been experimenting with and I’d be curious, Katie, to see if that’s something you’re doing at your school is putting students in the role of learning designers so that they are designing the learning in all sorts of spaces for other students–is that something that your students do do? And would that also include assessment?
• (52:14) If education is structured properly in the future sometime (in our perfect world), that we’ll have these kind of activities that there won’t need to be the standardized test because the activity itself will be the actual assessment, right?
• (53:11) What would you say about ways to apply these principles that are not necessarily game-based?
• (55:12) What are some of, you think, the biggest challenges that you see in your context in moving in or continuing to move in this direction, and also some of the biggest opportunities that you see for advancing the connected learning work?

View the Conversation
During the broadcast, the conversation also took place on Twitter using the hashtag #connectedlearning.

Guests for this webinar included:

• Cathie Howe
• Randall Fujimoto
• Vanessa Camilleri
• Katie Salen: Katie Salen locates her work in the field of game design and serves as the Executive Director of a non-profit called the Institute of Play that is focused on games and learning. She is also Professor of Games and Digital Media at DePaul University.
• Howard Rheingold

Resources for this webinar:

• Quest2Learn
• Institute of Play
• Howard Rheingold interviewing Katie Salen about DML2011
• Katie Salen-related content on DMLcentral.net
• Game Design work from the Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre
• Massively Minecraft Educator community
• Minecraft server at Temple University
• Example of Quest2Learn’s curriculum
• Example of Modeling Instruction
• Competency-based white papers fro iNACOL
• Open Badges project
• Clint Hocking’s blog
• Game-based learning content on NWP’s Digital IS site