All this talk about STEAM for game design as a teaching tool threatens to suck all the fun and joy out of the idea. So, why include it? For one, there is the continued need to show that education does not have to be boring and that play is a legitimate part of the learning process. Children learn by imitating as much as by internalizing facts and observation. There is a reason counting cubes and number lines help students achieve mastery of math. This is a concrete demonstration of how numbers work.
When researchers are working on making conceptual models real by demonstrable means with experiments, they have to use imagination and training to figure out the best approach. Sometimes this means rethinking how a device can be used. Other times it is pushing the envelope of what technology can do. In either case, people need to play with the ideas. Play is essential in daily life because it is how we solve puzzles. People borrow ideas from other skills and apply them to new tasks. The more experience people have, the more they do this. Analogous structures allow leaps of creativity, but it really is the brain at play.
The brain rewards us for these “ah-ha!” moments with a dopamine boost. It feels good to find something new or overcome an obstacle. That victory is the brain rewarding new knowledge and mastery, which is why people (especially kids) love playing games. For children there are far more new experiences to gain than for adults who have lived in the world long enough to make connections between disparate events and lose the sense of wonderment. Yet, a pervasive undertone informs the culture that these sensations mean learning is not occurring.
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Learning by Design – The STEAM Model, Part 6
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Learning by Design – The STEAM Model, Part 8