Instructional Design: Leveling
Charles Reiguluth, in his book Instructional-Design Theories and Models: A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory, Vol. II, discusses four major characteristics of design theories. First, they are design-oriented, offering guidance on achieving stated goals. Second, they offer good feedback and strong motivating factors. Third, overriding methods can be broken down into simpler component parts, and fourth, the methods are what he terms “probalistic,” meaning that adhering to the methods will probably help the learning goals to be realized, as opposed to certainly seeing the goals realized.
Good instructional design is certainly a key element in good educational video games. Commercial games hold good instructional design, as well. One of the key design elements in many commercial video games identified by James Paul Gee in his book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, was the notion of level mastery. Players can’t progress to the next level in a game until they’ve mastered their current level.
An old college buddy of mine owns a tae kwon do academy in Ft. Worth. While watching him put my kids through the paces one afternoon, I noticed the same instructional design element of level mastery in martial arts that Gee pointed out exists in video games. My kids were practicing jump kicks, where they ran, jumped, and split practice boards with their feet. Once they had achieved mastery, the instructor raised the bar by making them jump higher, break thicker boards, etc. Likewise, the whole belt system in martial arts is based on level mastery as well.
It does seem a promising notion in educational video games: if designers can meld level mastery with their desired academic objectives, then pure academic learning may be realized within a good video game.
February 19, 2007 5:45 pm 
