I’ve learned quite a few things in 20 years of teaching, and one of them is the motivational value of failure with low stakes. One of the best-known examples for most of us is video and arcade games. We lose pretty much every game we play; the goal is simply to keep going for as long as we can. When we lose a game, we remember what happened and we make a different choice when we get to the point where we lost previously.
In the 1980s, I spent far too much time playing a game called “hack” (also known as “nethack”, or a variant called “larn”). The “graphics” (if you could call them that) were standard keyboard characters; humans (including yourself) were @ signs, and monsters were letters, usually the first letter in the monster’s name. One common way a character could “die” was by starvation, and a character could eat monsters after killing them to prevent this. However, some monsters such as cockatrices were poisonous. When I lost a game and the tombstone graphic came up saying “Here lies [username] / Killed by a cockatrice cadaver” I duly remembered not to eat dead cockatrices and never made that mistake again.
As a teacher, I have had a lot of occasions to think about why kids will happily play video games for hours, when the only reward is that it takes longer and longer to lose, but they won’t spend fifteen minutes on a homework assignment where the reward is a better grade, greater understanding of a concept or topic, and a rosier future. Video games have several advantages over most types of school work:
- The player is actively doing something the entire time.
- The player is constantly taking in information and making decisions, which affect the outcome.
- When the player fails (loses the game), they can immediately start over, making use of what they just learned.
- There is clear evidence of progress (how far the player gets into the game before losing).
- There is no consequence for losing the game other than having to start over.
In my physics classes, I usually end the year with a fluids unit, because it has opportunities for a lot of hands-on activities at a time when students are burned out and need more incentives to keep going. Yesterday, after a lesson on buoyancy, I had my students build boats out of a 12″ × 10¾” sheet of aluminum foil and float them in the lab sinks, which were stoppered and filled with water. The object was to build a boat that could carry as much weight as possible. (I have a large supply of cast iron weights from a set that is old enough that the weights are labeled in ounces rather than grams.) I told my students that there was no prize or reward, other than the pride that goes along with success.
The entire class threw themselves into the activity with abandon. There was much frustration and gnashing of teeth over foil that got torn and boats that crumpled and sank. Each time, the frustrated student pulled the aluminum foil out of the sink and either reshaped it into another boat or got a new sheet of foil to replace a damaged one. Over the course of the activity, students went over to other sinks to check out how other students’ boats were doing, then ran back to try some of the ideas they had seen. The buzz of excitement went on for about an hour.
About 15 years ago, at the beginning of the year, a student said to me, “No offense, Mr. Bigler, but I don’t like science.” I asked, “When did you stop liking science?” The student replied, “When I was in fourth grade.” I asked why, and the student replied, “Because that’s when we stopped doing things and started learning out of books.”
Students need hands-on activities, and the more of the video game mentality we can imbue into them, the more the students will be motivated to do them. When my own children were toddlers, my mother-in-law told me, “Children should fall from low branches.” We educators need to stop pruning the trees until there aren’t any low branches left.
