I think authors should look more at implicit, rather than explicit, learning in games. For example, mastery of this basketball game I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing requires an intuitive mastery of basic geometry; the time limit forces you to react rather than to calculate. This ADL paper looks at games like this, 'mini-games', as a way to add objective-specific fun to learning. "Mini-games are usually small games that are easy to learn; hard to master. Think of Tetris as a good example of a Mini-game." The phage wars game I mentioned last week is a good example of a game that has a specific educational objective. But this paper grounds minigames in cognitive learning theory (which is less convincing) and a 'social cognitive' theory of motivation (which is more so). The paper describes some case studies: virtual field trip, lunar quest and insignia searcher. Now, the cognitive theory underlying this paper is mostly concerned with explicit learning, which it treats as a type of memory.
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