Label: Students’ perception of kids’ mindless engagement into the
available activities.
Problematic phenomenon: “Some of the boys were just pushing buttons: All figure out the game by discovery. But like science concepts, they can never be found out by a two-hour discovery session (some took 100's of years of systematic efforts). I know it is play-time and some of that should take place, but when do you actually get the children to think about what they are doing and to develop the patience to follow instructions? These are all questions I asked myself. What looked like mindless, useless images--was transformed into very educational games when I read the brochure. So it all boils down to the following: What is our (or our students') mission there? Cultural? Social? Cognitive? In my view, it’s all of these and it is that of teaching students things that will help them immensely with school tasks: patience, reasoning, use of language etc.” (Professor visiting the La Red Mágica site, 10/2/98)
Insights: We observed children redefining the goals of activities to make them fit their level of skill and interests. For example, from the game designers’ point of view the computer game “Oregon Trail” involved planning, problem solving, and decision making about how to survive as nineteenth century American pioneers moving across the continent. However, for some children, learning how to play the game, the goal of the game became to move through the stages until hunting animals was allowed and then to shoot as many animals as possible. For some other children, killing all the travelers as soon as possible was the initial goal of the game. Our students working with the children often were really frustrated that children were “off-task” or “cheating” the games. However, according to students’ later observations children changed their goals as their skills and familiarity with the games progressed.