When authors focus on bringing games and playfulness into the classroom, I more often than not put on my Mr. Skeptical Hat. Bringing play into the classroom can be a really difficult endeavor, especially when we’re dealing with play mediated by technology. It’s difficult enough to get students to engage with new and shiny technologies, but if they see the activity as frivolous, they seem to be even less likely to engage. So while we may have the best of intentions with bringing the fun via new tech, it’s a really risky move. We see this in the Haas and Gardner piece, where they had to spend TWO WEEKS to essentially teach their students how to play a text adventure game. One class? Maybe two? I can totally see that being worthwhile, but two weeks eats up about half of one unit for me. I don’t have time for that, and neither do my students—especially considering the fact that they likely won’t have to interface with something like that ever again.

If we want to bring playful tech into the classroom, it needs to super accessible in terms of learning how to interface with it or there needs to be some legitimate transfer between learning the fun tech and learning useful tech.