Ben Wildeboer, a 9th grade science teacher, provides a good introduction to the concept of hard fun in his blog, Re:Thinking: Science education should look like science. He writes:
In high school I’d spend hours in the back yard trying to perfect my curving corner kicks, not because it was easy, but because it was something I enjoyed.He goes on to say that a traditional school curriculum is largely lacking in activities that can be called hard fun.
Not because there’s something inherent about what we learn in school that prevents it from being hard fun, but because designing hard fun learning experiences requires a bit more flexibility, a lot more student control, and a heckuva lot less 'feeding' students the-one-right-way.Looking over the education literature, Wildeboer suggests that the idea of hard fun in education theory originates with Seymour Papert, who tells this story about the origin of the term:
Way back in the mid-eighties a first grader gave me a nugget of language that helps. The Gardner Academy (an elementary school in an under-privileged neighborhood of San Jose, California) was one of the first schools to own enough computers for students to spend significant time with them every day. Their introduction, for all grades, was learning to program, in the computer language Logo, at an appropriate level. A teacher heard one child using these words to describe the computer work: "It's fun. It's hard. It's Logo."
I have no doubt that this kid called the work fun because it was hard rather than in spite of being hard.
Once I was alerted to the concept of "hard fun" I began listening for it and heard it over and over. It is expressed in many different ways, all of which all boil down to the conclusion that everyone likes hard challenging things to do.Hence, Papert began to popularize the idea of hard fun in context of learning. In a 1999 statement titled, "The Eight Big Ideas Behind the Constructionist Learning Laboratory" Hard Fun is the third principle in his list.
The third big idea is hard fun. We learn best and we work best if we enjoy what we are doing. But fun and enjoying doesn't mean "easy." The best fun is hard fun. Our sports heroes work very hard at getting better at their sports. The most successful carpenter enjoys doing carpentry. The successful businessman enjoys working hard at making deals (cited in Gary Stager's blog, The Daily Paperet: Words and wisdom of Seymour Papert).So what does fun mean?
A word to the reader. We're just getting started here and there's a significant danger of confusion. Let's dig a bit deeper for a moment. One place to start is with Raph Koster. In his well-regarded book, A Theory of fun for Game Design (2005) puts the concept of fun in the center of the designer's universe. But he notes that the term fun is seriously ambiguous because 'having fun' covers such a wide range of human behavior in a rich variety of contexts. So when we speak of the enjoyment that is 'fun,'
... we actually mean a constellation of different feelings. Having a nice dinner out can be fun. Riding a roller coaster can be fun. Trying on new clothes can be fun. Winning at table tennis can be fun. Watching your hated high school rival trip and fall in a puddle of mud can be fun. Lumping all of these under 'fun' is a rather horribly vague use of the term.So its obvious that we need to be more precise about the meaning of 'fun' in the term 'hard fun.' In Koster's view, the fun in 'playful interaction' arises as the player increases his or her mastery or sense of comprehension from an activity. I feel that this is a useful definition from a play theory of learning perspective because it unites the feelings of engagement and attainment from the player's point of view. Like Wildeboer's attempt to master the art of the corner-kick in soccer, a learning challenge is hard fun because it not easily accomplished but it is very satisfying to try. Most recently, Sebastian Deterding's keynote address, From Game-based Learning to a Live Well-Played, at the Games, Learning, and Society Conference (Madison, WI, June 16, 2012) reprises this idea from Koster. Deterding says that the key to fun in a learning context are attainable challenges or 'learning challenges' that a game or other context requires a player to master. This means that a typical learning game is not 'fun' because it is a game; it's fun because it presents a well-designed challenge that is inherently fun for the player to attempt to master.
Over the next few posts, I will build upon Koster and Deterding to more precisely define the essential words like 'fun' in the context of learning.
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