I love video games!
I think we can learn a lot about effective teaching from video games. Being currently in a teaching program, and having made a few small games in the past, I’ve noticed several parallels. After all, games do teach us players: they teach us how to play them, about the world they’re set in, and how they progress their stories and character arcs. Some games are great at this, though we tend to think about this as a game “being intuitive”, or “having good world-building”.
In this series which I’m tentatively titling “Lessons from Gaming” (LFG), I want to highlight some of the connections between (math) teaching practices and game design principles I found. I’ve learned a surprising amount from analyzing games, so I might as well share some of those thoughts. I hope you’ll find them worth thinking about as well!