The other day I was running with such grace and ease that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would have been proud. My effortless breathing meshed with my creativity as I flowed through the woods. Were the trees really cheering me on? I even wrote this week’s column in my head.
Sadly, my brilliant words didn’t make it onto paper, and I was left to write this column from scratch. When I was marathon training, I often had these profound insights during my long runs and was sure that I was on the edge of solving the world’s most complex problems. My thoughts would evaporate, however, by the time I made it home. So, one day I decided to take my phone to record them. As expected, my thoughts were indeed brilliant. That is if you take brilliant to mean stunning in their muddle and confusion. I repeated this experiment several times, but the results were always the same.
There’s nothing quite like “being in the zone,” but of course, most of my runs are a far cry from effortless, not even close to the zone. They are mostly about willing myself to put one foot in front of another to achieve my running goals.
Reflecting on the nature of my recent flow-state run reminded me of lessons I learned while researching and developing a 3D immersive STEM game to help high school students learn math and coding. I had the privilege of working on the educational game with an amazing team of cognitive psychologists, software engineers, graphic artists and game designers. The lead designer was David A. Smith, an innovative pioneer of virtual reality and augmented reality.
The game was set on Mars after a Rover crashed into the red planet and smashed into pieces. Students worked through increasingly complex mathematical and programming challenges to put it back together to return to Earth.
A diverse group of high school students representing the games’ target audience informed development. We observed students as they talked aloud, describing their experience of what worked and what didn’t work as they played the game. Then, we made rapid changes incorporating what we learned and tested the new version with a different group of students to confirm the effectiveness of those changes. We repeated this intensive cycle.
Over time, as we adjusted the game, we witnessed students’ engagement increase and frustration go down. What struck us most was how absorbed a few students became in the game’s challenge. Many participants were so caught up in the game they wanted to keep playing until they found a solution. This happened even as students encountered difficulties, not least of which was their inability to build a computer program due to the absence of prior programming experience.
Many students were motivated by the cognitive conflict — the struggle to accomplish a goal — inherent in the game’s challenge. The players’ creative tension as they attempted to achieve a problem was so palpable that we observers could feel it. One student beautifully captured the experience: “At first you struggle, it is confusing, so you play around and get closer and closer to your goal, and it makes you want to try again and again, and then you get it and you are happy.”
We also observed that students working in their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) were the most intensely engaged in the Mars game. Lev Vygotsky’s ZPD is the Goldilocks zone, in which the content is challenging enough to make it interesting and doable. Typically, students will give up if it is too hard; if it is too easy, students won’t learn.
So, the goal is to scaffold students’ learning to bridge the distance between what students can do by themselves and what they can achieve with competent support. Well-designed games keep students engaged and attentive by incrementally increasing challenges at a rate that matches a player’s skill development.
David Smith argued that players’ game-based experience mirrors the learning process itself. He described it as successive waves of excitation that vary in intensity, amplitude, duration and frequency, with some game levels and activities being more routine and others more exciting.
David’s waves provide students with the time to practice and wrestle with new content and concepts. Then, restore their internal harmony or equilibrium as they come to absorb their learning. John Dewey described this as a spiral process in which “foreign subject-matter transformed through thinking into a familiar possession becomes a resource for judging and assimilating foreign subject-matter.”
The zone of optimal experience appears to reside between states of anxiety and boredom. One thing is for sure, time spent in the zone is enjoyable and results in deeper learning.
When I go out for my next run, the thing I need to remember is that you can’t always be in an effortless flow. Being stuck in the mud is an integral part of the process — you just have to wait for the next wave.
The topics of Money Matters relate to compilations and reflections from Barbara Freeman’s extensive work with government and intergovernmental agencies and the nonprofit and private sectors across five continents. She is the founder and CEO of LaMedichi, a Roaring Fork Valley-based nonprofit dedicated to enabling people who are unbanked and underbanked to achieve financial security. To reach her, email Barbara at barbarafreeman1@comcast.net.
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October 26, 2021 at 04:00PM
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