Regular readers know I’ve been concerned with adolescent sleep deprivation, and the effects on schooling. The issue:

• Adolescents need more sleep than either younger children or adults. Their bodies are working hard.
• Their natural circadian rhythm is to stay up later and wake later than either younger children or adults. The effect is not culturally determined, although cultural factors (computers, TMing, phones) may turn out to play into the package. (If your brain says “I’m not tired,” and all your friends are up and talking….)
• Most U. S. secondary schools start earlier for teens, rather than later, as they should. The result is a surprisingly high rate of sleep deprivation in teen learners.

For details, see Walking Zombies – Adolescent Sleep Deprivation.

National Public Radio has offered an encouraging update on the topic, along with some advice on helping teens get better sleep.

Morning Edition, January 18, 2007
Most high schools begin their day around 7:30 a.m., which leaves many teenagers nodding off in the morning. In fact, at least 20 percent of high school students fall asleep in class on a typical day. The problem: Teenagers need a lot of sleep — about nine hours each night, experts say. And most of them aren’t getting enough….
According to the National Sleep Foundation, more than 80 school districts around the country have now made the change to start their high schools later. These districts range from large, urban school districts, such as Minneapolis and Denver, to suburban districts, such as Jessamine County in central Kentucky.

My partner Tom and I spoke to Poudre School District counselors Thursday. Tom’s topic was the addictive potential of online games. Agreed: Gaming is a problem when it takes over. As a counterbalance to that concern, I asked What is positive about gaming? What is there to respect in in? Why do kids play? Why are so many kids so interested? At the core of that, I asked, What cognitive and social learning potential may exist in online games?

I think many adults customarily ask “Why do they play this game?” I asked the group to ask instead, “Why do they play this game?”

It was a great group – full of ideas and quickly focused on critical questions like how we could help kids find balance in their online gaming. I gave participants an outline of possible categories of learning, based on the concept of effective real-world intelligence that lies at the heart of Grow With the Flow. I promised to post some of my own thoughts on those categories – on the learning potential of games.

In my talk, I focused on MMORPGs: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Play Games – games like Everquest, Asheron’s Call, some of the endless versions of Final Fantasy, and the charmingly antiquated Runescape. They have perhaps the greatest potential both positively, in what skills can be developed, and negatively, in their addiction potential. I talked about one MMORPG in particular: World of Warcraft (WoW)

I don’t play WoW, but I had excellent informants, all men in their late 20s - mid 30s: a computer programmer, game dabbler, with friends who are serious players, and friends who write games for a living; a grad student mathematician / astronomer who has always preferred board games; a young father, corporate professional with gaming background, who lives in the world of on-the-job electronic tools; a current player who fits in a few hours of play around work and school, and who generously (and patiently!) led me through the “What’s going on?” of a couple screenshots from WoW.

My informants urged me to emphasize this key point: To look at gaming and see its good, you have to cut through the surface and the theme to the nature of the play. Whether a game is about elves, aliens, or soldiers matters less than the challenges posed and the skills needed to play well. That isn’t easy to do with W0W. The surface can be freaky to adults; my first screenshot showed an Undead Warlock, a member of the Horde. If you stop looking when you hear that, you’ll never get to what matters.

On January 11, 2007, Blizzard Entertainment announced that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft has reached a new milestone, with 8 million players worldwide. The game is one part of a $10.5 billion industry in 2005. If your plan is to wait until it goes away….

Some basics: When you play WoW, you are always online, in a world populated at every moment by many thousands of other real-life people. You are playing a character, an avatar, who develops specialized abilities. At all but basic levels, you are likely to be playing in a guild, a team, which coordinates characters with different abilities to be successful on a mission. All the play – this is critical – is in real time (RT): If you go to dinner or bed, play continues. To learn more, check the World of Warcraft website or the Wikipedia article on World of Warcraft.

I won’t redo my talk here, so what follows is more or less the answer sheet for a quiz you didn’t take unless you were there. If you’re interested in the details, you may want to sit down with a WoW player and these ideas, and ask them whether I got some of it right – Do they see these same learning potentials in WoW? The broad categories here are taken from Grow With the Flow. I also used some much earlier development notes from Panlaudy, a game Paul and I developed; I hope to post about that someday. These are just my casual thoughts – some categories are left blank “as an exercise for the reader,” as a math text might say. (Meaning, I don’t have all weekend to get this posted!)

A GWTF Analysis of the Learning Potential of Gaming
(Using WoW as an example)

Basic Cognitive Abilities — The First Tributary

While areas like Energy Level, Attention, General Learning Style, and General Memory Processes are involved, and may be sharpened, Grow With the Flow focuses early development through this category, so I exclude it here.

Many Ways to Be Smart — The Second Tributary

• Body Intelligence – reflexes, energy management, control of impulsivity
• Personal Intelligence – Most play is in teams (Guilds) – task-oriented communication, social stability in the team (keeping up the chatter), negotiating coordinated plans, maintaining motivation and coordinated action, conflict resolution. ("Stand by me!"), social voice under pressure, supporting teammates under stress (See also “Team Player,” below)
• Visual-Spatial Intelligence – maps and map-to-situation conversions, map to game spatial reasoning, mapping the abstraction onto the game reality, converting 2D external representations to 3D internal representations, observing surroundings, switching observation scale (big picture < --> immediate surroundings); reading, interpretation, and analysis of complex, interrelated visual displays with vital information
• Language Intelligence –
• Reading and Writing Intelligence –
• Number Intelligence – quantitative analysis (distance and position, evaluating relative strengths, numerical projections)
• Musical Intelligence – Especially if you’re a fan of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky period!

The Director — Management Functions — The Third Tributary

• Organization and Coordination of Effort
  * Data Integration Leading to Actions (Fast analysis, reasoning, problem solving, predictions, based on multiple inputs (position, characteristics, resources, support, personal skills, social reading of teammates), with consequences for actions. Strategies based on analysis, which may need to be adjusted or abandoned. Coordinating tactics to advance strategic plans) –
  * Resource management –
• Multitasking – RT, cross-modality, complex, constant, critical
• Time Management – All play is RT, with critical consequences for poorly distributed use of time
• Thinking and Problem Solving (Including Strategic Planning and Control, Information Gathering and Evaluation, Forming Hypotheses and Possible Solutions, Using the Tools of Problem Solving and Logic, Settling on and Evaluating Solutions) –
• Metacognition – Ask a player about how he thinks about the act(s) of playing the game. You may be surprised at the depth.
• Flexibility / Adaptability –
• Team Player (Including both Compliance and Cooperation and going Beyond Compliance) – Advanced levels require cooperation – you can’t succeed “by running around” on your own – you join a guild with other people and go on cooperative missions together.

Motivation — The Fourth Tributary

• Involvement – This may be where the continuum goes to addiction.
• Management of Motivation and Emotions – Self management of emotions under pressure, coming back from failure, perseverance

Knowledge, External Intelligence, Info Management — The Fifth Tributary

• Orientation to Knowledge – knowledge is essential to success, ignorance or faulty information has dire consequences
• Knowledge Base – rote memory, knowledge acquisition (terminology, characteristics, development hierarchies
• External Intelligence – a very large knowledge base is available, which can improve play. Some of that knowledge is developed cooperatively – see sites like Thotbot. (Run your mouse over the headings to see the subcategories.)
• Information Management–

Daniel Goleman reminded me of the Yerkes-Dodson Law in a recent NYT article. I had long since forgotten its name; when I mention it to clients, I call it “the inverted U.”

The Yerkes-Dodson Law demonstrates an empirical relationship between arousal and performance. It dictates that performance increases with cognitive arousal but only to a certain point: when levels of arousal become too high, performance will decrease. A corollary is that there is an optimal level of arousal for a given task.

At the left of the curve, picture complete boredom – no arousal, no learning. As you go over the top, and on to the right side, imagine arousal going to agitation, stress, and anxiety; again, there’s no learning taking place. Best performance is at that top point, which Goleman calls the brain’s sweet spot.

Goleman is interested in the sweet spot (or, shall we say, the sour spots) in relation to high-stakes testing. His argument is yet another caution about the poor use we make of group achievement tests; you know I’m always happy to see another nail in that coffin of the should-be-dead.

But I’m more intrigued by a general implication that lurks in the Y-D Law. Let me pose it as two questions:

• Kids have a sweet spot for learning, a just-enough level of arousal that avoids the Scylla of boredom and the Charybdis of anxiety / stress / pressure. Shouldn’t it be a primary goal of education to ease every child into the sweet spot as many minutes of each day as is possible?
• Would kids, under “the right” educational circumstances, tend to hold themselves in the sweet spot?

This arrived by email:

The snow kept us up all night (as we have a squawking window) and we are all tired this morning. Dexter was very playful and kept running back to a plug for Christmas lights he was told over and over by Laura to not play with. Surprisingly, though we are all tired and weary, no one lost their cool after the 20th time in a row of Dexter wandering back to the plug.
 
Okay, that’s the setup… now, I think this was a great result and behavior by all. Dexter was just playing a game and shouldn’t have been too reprimanded for that. But the continued and seemingly intentional direct defiance could easily put one into a defensive “I said” posture. How can I remember in the future in moments like this that this outcome was ultimately much more satisfying for all?
 

By way of background, Dexter is 14 months old.

Matt doesn’t ask the question I expected ("Did we do right not to reprimand?"), but a far more subtle one: “This interaction felt good – how can I remember to do it again, when my knee-jerk may be to respond in ways I don’t like?”

* Um, Remember! It worked. Success feels good. We tend to remember and repeat things that lead to a good feeling. Pursue the good feeling, and you’ll usually do right. I’ve been working lately on a radical dictum, which this exemplifies: “Easier is better.” That’s for another post.

* Calling it “defiance” puts a negative spin on the qualities involved. Do you want a kid who stands up for himself? Thinks for himself? Explores his world? Tests limits? All those qualities are on continua, where you also hope for some compliance, mutual problem solving), caution and restraint, even occasional willingness to trust your judgment and experience.

* What we could call the Action X Result matrix in this situation is unbalanced. Say you don’t reprimand. If that’s a mistake, which I doubt, the result will be one with a slow build-up – based on very many such incidents, Dexter may gradually come to not listen to you when he should. But say you flair out at him – yell, pull him away from the plug, lecture him. Kids are resilient. But I think things like this have single-incident potential. We are wired to remember springs with sweet water. But we’re wired even more strongly to remember that this waterhole has a saber-tooth tiger ready to grab us. There are times as parents when we have to act – have to be the bad guy – have to be the hard-nose. But sometimes when we think we have to act, it’s just a cover for our own emotional reaction. “I can’t let him get away with that!” leads to a fight between two children, one child a couple decades older than the other.

* So far as I can tell, the Terrible Twos run from about now until four or five, then take a rest until hormones hit. I don’t know how the parenting myth is structuring those years right now, but to my way of thinking, they aren’t terrible at all, but a necessary exploration. Who am I in relation to others? It’s critical to work this out; otherwise, you end up with someone who is living at home at age 45. It’s the main business of adolescence – separating, becoming your own person. Dexter is getting started on this long, tricky game.

* I think the best guide through what are sometimes very difficult moments is to keep your eye on your longest-range goals. You’re helping shape an adult. What qualities do you want that adult to have? What relationship do you want with him? The light plug is one interaction among hundreds of thousands. Each contributes. When he brings his kids over for Christmas thirty-five years from now, what sort of person do you want to greet when you open the door?