This article suggests lessons that other teachers can learn from jazz teachers in motivating students and talks about the social, constructivist, and personal aspects of jazz that make it a passion for students who may otherwise be uninterested in school. "Students need to be doing something every day to demonstrate their learning."

The iPhone can be a freeing tool for the blind, especially when their needs are addressed through apps designed by blind people.

Here's a little introduction to motivation in psychology that you might find interesting--the other videos on the site are worth a peek, as well (though FYI, they are by no means as fun to watch as TED Talks).

This post talks about the highly engaging "Gamercamp," referring to some concepts we discussed in T545, and goes on to discuss the potential for gaming in education.

This post discusses downsides of gamification in the classroom, and it links to many interesting resources.  "I'm increasingly concerned about approaches that I think will suck the life out of gaming and play..."

This article talks about a participatory design initiative with undergraduates at Utah State University to determine how higher education could be transformed into a more engaging and cohesive experience. "What if we put students in the driver's seat of a new kind of R&D to transform higher education? One that provided a platform for engaging students more fully in a real world effort that also involved faculty, administrators, support services and more?"

This article is fairly old, but I thought its topic resonated with our discussion in class last Monday--particularly the pink box of pink Legos.

This talks about the practices at some programs that are known for educating innovators:  "The culture of learning in programs that excel at educating for innovation emphasize what I call the three P's-play, passion and purpose. The play is discovery-based learning that leads young people to find and pursue a passion, which evolves, over time, into a deeper sense of purpose."

This wiki collects numerous resources regarding gamification: videos, books, examples of gamified websites, and explanations of specific game mechanics.

Here's a fun infographic that overviews gamified learning and provides a timeline that features some games we've studied for this course.

This Kickstarter project aims to fund a standards-aligned history board game that engages students. The free companion web application will track students' progress, allowing for differentiated instruction while making the game "fun to play again and again: as players answer question cards, they earn badges and can unlock new careers and powers. The game becomes a story, a competition, and a World History simulation with limitless possibilities."

Hear MIT GAMBIT Lab experts talk about engagement in practical terms--and get some hands-on experience designing a board or video game. The three-hour workshops are part of the Cambridge Science Festival; this event takes place on April 28 and requires a $5 preregistration. Though I'm sure EMF will be touched on one way or another in all of the workshops, I thought the Serious Games for Social Change workshop might be of particular interest to you all: "In this workshop, best practice examples of serious games for social change will be played, discussed and analyzed. Furthermore ideas and sketches for proto-types will be developed and ways of realizing them will be discussed! The workshop gives the participants hands-on experiences and insights into the potential and limits of video games designed for social change. No pre-experiences are needed!"

This longer gamasutra article talks about Macro Flow and Micro Flow, complete with Csikszentmihalyi's flow diagrams. "Macro flow is the constant rise in difficulty to compete with the player's increasing skill level, maintaining the balance between boredom and anxiety. Macro flow refers to the entire gameplay experience from the beginning of the game until the end, and having a good macro flow will likely result in constant interest and intrinsic motivation on the part of the player throughout the course of the game." "Micro flow is short intense periods of flow that happen frequently, as well as the constant adaptation of the game's challenges to the player's increase in skill level. It is perpetuated by repeated successes in rapid succession, which provides positive emotional and tangible feedback encouraging the player to continue in the micro flow; this is known as a virtuous cycle."

Here is a succinct treatment of cognitive flow and its relevance for game design.

A very short clip about a "great model" in the game industry (microtransactions) that allows EA to take advantage of a player's engagement.

Caspian Learning built an immersive 3D serious game for Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity in the UK to increase operator engagement in training to use medical hoists.

I found the recaps of these seminars (and the handbook linked from this page) very interesting. Seminar 2 specifically focuses on the role of narrative--at what point it should enter the design process, how it can increase motivation and enjoyment or serve as a distraction, issues with traditional narrative in an interactive medium, etc. This quote from the Seminar 2 overview reminded me of relatedness from SDT Theory: "It was agreed that a quality necessary for engagement with narrative was that of identification with characters or a situation (an example was given from a mine disaster simulation with junior children, where the degree of engagement with the narrative content due to the identification with the victims drove the experience forward). Authenticity could also contribute to engagement. Whilst hard to pin down, it could mean authenticity for the children in cultural terms or in terms of being a 'human' story, one of a kind which resonates for them."

This article talks about experiential gaming and making the construct of flow operational for educational games. The study used a business simulation and questionnaire to measure videogame "flow antecedents" like clear goals and challenge-skill balance, flow state indicators like concentration and time distortion, and the "flow consequences" of learning and exploratory behavior for about 100 students attending a school of economics. "This study is part of an ongoing attempt to develop a usable and valid scale for assessing flow experience in educational games." (Log in with Harvard access)

A study out of Stanford looked at how videogames, in particular serious games and games for health, can activate circuits in the brain associated with positive motivation. "The study published today provides new insights into how these effects might have occurred, revealing that active participation in gameplay events is key to activating the brain's positive motivation circuits. Seeing and hearing the same information without active participation in gameplay had no impact on activity in positive motivation circuits."

This article talks about a study on the positive and negative effects of "challenge stress" and "hindrance stress" on motivation to learn and learning performance. I linked the citation here; to access the full text, I recommend using Harvard's E-Research site to search for the Journal of Applied Psychology and then getting to the article via the EBSCO link in the catalog record. (Or else find J Appl Psuchol through EBSCO and log in with Harvard LibX.)