The principles of how children learn are stable whether applied to classrooms, digital games, or community settings, which includes designing playful learning into public spaces like bus stops, parks, or even the metaverse.
A range of education stakeholders, including learning and development researchers, educators, and employers reached consensus that success in the workplace of tomorrow will require mastery of a suite of skills or what the Brookings Institution has termed, “skills for a changing world.” Such skills, like collaboration, critical thinking and creative innovation, broaden our view of achievement beyond core academic subjects like reading and math.
In a paper published by the Brookings Institution. Presented the value of playful learning for enriching a suite of skills that she and Roberta Golinkoff called the 6Cs. Our claim is that educational products and classrooms have been riveted by attention to content that can be most easily measured and tested. While society surely needs children to understand the basics of reading and mathematics, it demands so much more for a child to be prepared for the workplace of the future. The 6Cs or outcomes are based on the science of learning and backed by a large body of evidence. Collaboration or social relationships are the foundation for an interconnected suite of skills. The following is a brief description of the 6 Cs as presented by Golinkoff in their book “Becoming Brilliant:”
Collaboration: Collaboration reflects how social engagement is central to human nature as a core for learning, community building, and cultural understanding. Interestingly, recent neuroscience research shows how collaborative play yields unique patterns of synchronized brain activity between infants and adults. These initial collaborations further support the development of young children’s self-regulation skills. Children advance their understanding of collaboration through the elementary school years, which supports academic achievement. Communication: Communication—speaking, writing, reading, and listening—is essential in our daily lives. In early childhood, language skills develop through back-and-forth conversations between children and their parents. When children begin kindergarten, their language skills at that time are the strongest predictor of their later academic performance in language, reading, and math, as well as their social skills. Communication builds on—and is contingent upon—infants’ first collaborative interactions with others in their environment. The ability to collaborate and communicate—together—lay the groundwork for all subsequent skills. Content: Traditional content includes reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and the arts, but it is also important to recognize “learning to learn” or executive function skills, including attention and working memory, that support children’s academic achievement. Content builds on the scaffold of collaboration—and particularly communication—across the disciplines, including math, literacy, science, and social studies. While we often think of learning in “bins” (e.x., children learn math content only in math class), a growing body of research shows that executive functioning provides a broad foundation for reading and math skills. Only once children have established collaboration and communication skills can they be ready to master content and move toward higher levels of learning. Critical thinking: Strong critical thinkers can evaluate the quality of information they receive and ideally use those skills both inside and outside the classroom. Yet, students particularly struggle with this task when evaluating online sources, an essential skill in the 21st-century. The good news is that critical thinking and the related skill of reasoning can be taught. Critical thinking is preceded by children’s abilities to collaborate, communicate, and engage meaningfully with curricular content. Only once they have that content mastery can they begin to think critically about the knowledge they gain. Creative innovation: Creative innovation—the synthesis of content and critical thinking—enables students to use what they know to make something new and develop innovative solutions to the challenges they face now and in the future. Play directly supports that innovation in both language and art. Moreover, because play encourages curiosity and exploration, it also fosters creativity, which can—and should—be seen as an asset to any job. In fact, creativity is ranked as the third most important skill for employment according to the World Economic Forum. Creative thinking depends on collaboration, communication, sufficient content knowledge, and the ability to engage critically with that content by seeing connections between content and real-world experiences. Creativity enables children to make something new out of those connections—to generate original solutions to problems. Confidence: Children who are confident in their abilities demonstrate persistence and flexibility, even when they experience failure. Confidence is closely related to “grit,” which is defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals” and a “growth mindset”—the belief that one can improve her abilities because they are not fixed in time at a particular level. Parents’ attitudes toward their children’s performance—and occasional failure—also strongly predict children’s views of their own abilities, which sometimes leads to the development of a fixed, as opposed to growth, mindset. In this way, children’s interactions with others help to shape their perceptions of their own capabilities. The final skill in the set, confidence, both physical and intellectual, enables children to use their skills in collaboration, communication, content mastery, and critical and creative thinking to push the boundaries of their learning.
Taken together, playful learning provides a checklist for how children learn and the 6Cs offer a systemic checklist of what children learn—or what they can and should learn. Once the formula is clear, it is easy to fashion the digital and live landscapes to conform to the best principles for learning. A metaverse can be designed to offer a context and experiences that enable and encourage collaboration, communication, mastery of content, creative thinking, creative innovation, and confidence. Figure 1 offers the twin checklists for playful learning characteristics and the 6Cs—the how and what of learning. With a well-defined learning goal, if designers and educators use this checklist, they can determine whether the virtual space in the metaverse they are designing is likely to be truly educational or merely just fun.
Revisiting the previous Greek mythology lesson, it was fun, active and minds on, engaging without being distracting, meaningful in its interconnections, and socially interactive. It also encouraged students to build the project together, to communicate with one another around the content of history, archeology, and STEM. It fostered critical thinking as the students bring the evidence from the dig to bear on their view of the artifacts they find. And in this exercise, they showed persistence in piecing together the pieces of the puzzle—the jug. The learning goal was well-defined as one to demonstrate the history of the myths, careful critical reading, and STEM skills through spatial learning and puzzle construction. Finally, the example clearly “jumped” the screen of the fantastical world, when the class re-entered the real world and the teacher, now guide on the side, led the class through the lesson plan, connected today’s insights with what they discovered in their previous lessons, and supported children’s development of skills outside the metaverse.
Consider the alternative. A virtual space is created that looks well-designed and is gamified. The graphics are spectacular and there is related content available to explore, but these puzzle pieces do not fit together to result in a full understanding of the times (picture the ability to click on what are essentially Wikipedia articles as children navigate the space). Ads for other virtual spaces abound. Children are given a list of tasks to complete to earn “points” that are linked to a project grade. Teachers log in to ensure that all children meet the minimum requirements, but their role has been minimized as they “supervise” the digital activities of 200 children a year. These children are solo agents in an attractive space, but designers must note the difference in what Troth and St rouse call the distinction between attention-directing versus attention distracting features of interactive digital media. Early studies on TV viewing and electronic books in young children show that strategically placed auditory or animated pictures can direct children’s attention to important content and aid comprehension, but that too many interactive features can distract. Educational spaces within the metaverse can align with the science of how children learn. Now is the time to design educational spaces with children at the center.
For more information and updates, Kindly follow my blog which is available under this article and remember to check out other published articles which you can access through clicking on my profile.
You must be logged in to post a comment.