My six-year-old son Grant loves school—that is, all school except the Sunday Chinese School. To him, it is boring, too hard, and no fun. Last year, after trying the kindergarten class at our local Chinese school (and being a left-behind student) for two months, he dropped out.

Being a liberal educator and a non-tiger mom, I didn’t feel like forcing him to learn something that he was not interested in—until one day he said to me, “Mommy, do you know why I can’t speak Chinese? It’s because you never taught me when I was a baby!”

As a mother, I had been used to being named the source of all faults, but this particular accusation brought me chills—I would be considered a criminal, at least by myself, if he brought up the same claim when he graduates from high school.

Ridden by guilt, I sent him back to Chinese school this fall.

On the first day of school, dropping Grant off at the first graders’ classroom was quite dramatic: all the parents and their well-behaved kids watched me struggle to break away from his clenching and screaming. But then something happened, and it made my Chinese-resenting son fall in love with learning Chinese. This something was a computer program on a CD that was given to first-grade Chinese students as a homework assignment. After learning the rhymed text in class, students were supposed to unscramble the sentences by dragging the characters to the right location. They were timed for their action and given a code to copy down to their homework booklet as proof of completion.

With his eyes fixed on the screen and his hand fiercely moving the mouse, Grant completed his weekly assignments at once and moved on to the next lesson by himself. Once in a while, he would throw his hand over his head and shake his fist, announcing with excitement “yeah, I got it in fifty seconds, Mommy” or “seriously, Mommy, I’ve got it in zero seconds before!” I know that zero-second record was a miscount because he couldn’t read the Chinese word for a minute that stood in front of zero seconds, but nevertheless, I was thrilled—not just by my son’s progress but more by witnessing live evidence of the impact of technology or, more precisely, the strategy of making learning a fun game.

When I put my instructional designer’s hat on to analyze this learning scenario, I see that this simple, computer-aided learning exercise designed by Dr. Liping Ma as part of her Chinese-language curriculum contains quite a number of gaming characteristics, even though it wasn’t branded as a game. In fact, it carries elements of all three general good-game design principles summarized by Dr. James Paul Gee (Learning by Design: good video games as learning machines):

• Empowered Learners—It was not me dragging him into a classroom; it was he himself driving the mouse and the movement of the words.
• Problem Solving—There is a challenge for Grant: he has to compete with himself to complete the task in shorter and shorter times.
• Understanding—Grant has to comprehend the rules of the game as well as the foundation of it, which is the meaning of each Chinese character (even though he didn’t realize that).

Using technology as its powerful carrier, games—in all forms and shapes—are invading our lives. They are commonly viewed by parents and educators as a threat—an evil monster made with some additive ingredients that competes with us for our children’s, our students’, and even our own attention and making it hard for all of us to focus on the right things, such as learning. In dealing with this “threat,” we have tried to shut it out (can you guess how many places I have tried to hide my son’s Nintendo DS?); we have used it to incentivize (“If you finish your homework, you get to play Nintendo for twenty minutes”); and in some rare cases, we have used it as a tool to teach (such as downloading a math or a spelling game to cover up the true purpose of learning with the mask of a game).

Above and beyond these commonly used strategies, there are people who have been trying to push the battle to a whole new level: they have dived into the core of the monster to detect those ingredients that have made it so evilly appealing and addictive. They are the researchers from both sides of the battle field: learning scientists and game designers. And they found out that designing a good game follows the same instructional-design principles that have made learning happen in an effective and pleasant way:

• it engages the player/student with the appropriate level of challenges
• it rewards the player/student with incentives (points, scores, levels, and/or encouraging words)
• it offers chances for nonwinners to try again
• it provides rules and support in clear and intuitive ways
• it fosters a sense of competition either with others or with the player him or herself
• it puts the player/student in the driver’s seat to make choices and to control the progress
• it offers a combination of consistent elements (so you don’t get lost) and surprises (so you don’t get bored)
• it calls for sensory involvement of eyes, hand(s), and brain
• it makes it possible for one to play as someone else
• it connects the players and/or forms a community

(This list will grow longer after more ideas and practices are shared by DePaul faculty at the Annual DePaul Faculty Teaching and Learning Conference—Playing with Purpose: Apply Game Design Principles for Learning, on April 20th, 2012. Please stay tuned for the Teaching Commons announcement.)

I hope as you read through this list, you will share my feeling that it is not just games that are everywhere—those game ingredients are easy to find in our lives and in our teaching practices. The other day, when Grant got back from his Chinese school, he gestured a high five to me—“Mom, guess what, I earned eight points for my team today!” I heard my heart chirping with gratitude to his teacher who probably hadn’t noticed that she had just “game-ized” a dry character quiz.

Dr. James Paul Gee said, “Under the right conditions, learning, like sex, is biologically motivating and pleasurable for humans (and other primates).” By making it explicit, the game-design principles can offer us some clue to establish those right conditions so that the misconception of learning-as-work will be corrected by learners who then would reclassify their act of gaining knowledge as a leisure activity.

One evening after finishing my work-late day, I came home to find my husband battling with our five-year-old daughter and six-year-old son on the living room floor. With my daughter fiercely grabbing Daddy’s legs, my son pulled the pillow from his hand and jumped underneath the coffee table—“touchdown!” he yelled. As the two little ones marched on for another round of football, I heard my husband stopping them, “Grant, what was you score? OK, 38… So with a touch down, you get 6. What is your score now? What about the one point for the kick….”

As he paused to add the numbers up in his head, my little football player had no clue that he was taking a math class in disguise. But for the Daddy, he surely was game in catching a teachable moment to build some learning—thanks to that ten years spousal influence!