During a recent class my professor brought up the works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the book Flow. While I only had the chance to read chapter three, I quickly agreed with the simplistic nature of flow, “joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p. xi as cited in Smith and Wilhelm, 2002, p. 28). Many of his later works detail this “state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter” (p. 4).
When we began to look at the concept of flow and how people learn, I realized the true engagement that was inherent with this state. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that more than anything else, men and women seek happiness (p. 1). They do not seek happiness through pleasure alone, rather through enjoyment. For “after an enjoyable event we know that we have changed, that our self has grown: in some respect, we have become more complex as a result of it” (p. 46). Whether through sports, reading, cooking, or a myriad of other activities, people can and do experience flow.
Could this enjoyment in learning be created in today’s classroom? Smith and Wilhelm investigate young men, literacy, and what gives them the flow experience in Reading Don’t Fix no Chevys. Near the end of chapter two, they discuss video games, sequencing of experiences, and flow. Think of the steps that go into creating a video game: conceptualization, developing, playing, sharing, and revising. Creating a video game has the same higher order thinking skills that many of our school seek today. Couldn’t creating a video game become a final project to apply or transfer learning? In some high schools and technical colleges it already has.
After presenting at ICE this year, Mother Mika told me that the conference was a buzz about Scratch. This simplified video game creation tool makes “programming like playing with Lego bricks“. To understand more, I suggest a short article from the Chronicle of Higher Learning or simply watch the video report. After a few minutes to download and go through a brief tutorial, I was creating a moving object. I stopped my progress and looked at the completed games others had done with the simple programming language. Amazing!
What does this have to do with iPods? I don’t want “creating a video game” to be one of the many things David Warlick, David Jakes, and Alan November say kids do outside of school. Mihaly says, “to improve life one must improve the quality of experience” (p. 44). Scratch has the possibility of making learning an enjoyable and truly a flow experience for many of our students. Playing Scratch reaffirmed the reality that our clientèle and world has changed and we need to adapt our instruction as well (see Did You Know and A Vision of Students Today).
At the end of our discussion my professor summarized the experience of flow as just the right balance of ability and challenge tempered with appropriate feedback (Thomas, 2008). Can educational use of video games create flow for our learners? Thanks to the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, I think so.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Enjoyment and the Quality of Life. Flow the psychology of optimal experience (pp. 43-70). New York: Harper & Row.
Smith, M. W., & Wilhelm, J. D. (2002). Reading don’t fix no Chevys literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Thomas, J., Dr. (2008, February 2). What is flow? Class discussion presented at Aurora University, Institute for Collaboration.
