Every teacher who has ever written a lesson plan or stood in front of a group of students or adults for that matter, must worry about engagement.  This week’s readings all touch on engagement and experience both in interaction design and in real life.

From Sherdoff’s Elements of Experience Design:

I like the way Sherdoff breaks experience into three concrete steps: attraction, engagement and conclusions.  A lesson planner or instructional designer would find this a useful outline. It is missing the meat of the lesson – perhaps that is the engagement part – but overall, it is a useful framework.  The rest of the elements that fit into this framework are helpful–interactivity, creativity, style and presentation make this article a useful principled article.

From Pogrow’s SuperMath:

This concept revolves around the idea of narrative, contextual learning, anchored instruction and situated learning environments.  The SuperMath niche is that students aren’t attracted to adult or real-life contextual environments and they must be engaged at their own level about things that interest them and their imagination. Interesting idea.  I think it lends a hand, but if we want transfer, I think we need to bridge both learning situations.

From Michele Dickey’s Engaging by Design:

My favorite quote in this long literature review about how video and computer games can inform instruction:

“Prensky (2001) similarly argued that computer and video games model and promote cognitive traits that are consistent with children raised with technology. According to Prensky, electronic games require active engagement in environments, which supports discovery, observation, trial and error, and problem solving. Additionally, computer games are graphical environments that require players to read the visual environment and interpret symbols. These skills are becoming increasingly important to foster learning.”