Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

It seems like yesterday that we were all playing Tetris. Wait a minute - it WAS just yesterday for many!

As Tetris celebrates its 25th anniversary, it's time for a quick post on why this game continues to be so popular. It's simple - scaffolding.

It's it's simplest form, scaffolding is just making sure the environment matches the learner's (or player's) capabilities. There's a lot more to scaffolding, to be sure, but for this discussion, that's enough.

Tetris starts out slow, below the "this-is-too-hard!" threshold for most of us. You succeed, and then succeed again. Everyone likes to succeed. Then the game speed gradually increases, and eventually you fail. But you are left with a score, perhaps a personal best, and that score is recorded, perhaps just for you, or maybe shared across the net. So you are enticed to play the game again, and again, in hopes of beating your personal best, your friend's top score, or maybe even an international champion's mark of fame.

It's this simple concept that makes games so perfect for education - it taps into our basic need to succeed.

Yet Tetris is little more than shaped blocks falling from the sky. Can it be adapted for a specific learning domain? Sure! It's easy to extend the game concept to other areas. Imagine a Tetris-like game that uses molecular bonds for shapes. You have to make sure you place the right molecule in the right place to succeed. How about philosophy? Why not take some basic tenets of a philosophy and match them up to the correct philosopher? Astronomy? Match star types up. And so on.

I think many people look at the standard arcade-like games such as Tetris and just stop. You have to extend your imagination with any non-educational game to see the educational affordances. Give it a try! Take your favorite game from yesteryear and ponder on how you could transform it into an educational winner.