The Super Mario Effect

 

Last year I came across this very cool Ted Talk by Mark Rober. Mark Rober is a youtuber who is channel focuses on teaching science in a fun way, as well as creating new inventions. On his Ted Talk he talks about Super Mario and how trying to solve each level helped him to focus on the end goal instead of failures.

This week readings about Digital natives and Digital immigrants remind me of this video. In my last post, I talked about Prensky and how according to him the educational system was not up to date with technology, and he mentions video games and how learning can be fun. Mark Rober’s video is all about teaching useful things through play.

His video also remind me about the way this course is going to be graded. When we play a video game, we might lose a life, but we can try again and there are always fun ways to gain more lives. There is no video game, where you die and cannot come back (except Jumanji😂). The grading system about this course is all about passing or failing. We are not evaluated based on points and even if you “failed” an assignment you are still able to compensate it by using the tokens. Just like a video game you still have a chance to try again.

Mark makes a very good point about the fact that our educational system still focuses on grading points and even though it is true that teachers need to know if students are understanding the lessons, there are better ways to evaluate that. You may assign the students experiments that they can complete at home and if something didn’t go quite right, they can receive feedback and try again. In the end this will increase the student’s confidence and they won’t be afraid to fail. If any anybody in the class has taken EDP 5216, you might identify this as the Cognitive Apprenticeship Model, where the teacher provides the student enough support to try something and then little by little takes away the support as the student learns to complete the task by himself/herself. At the end, the student can reflect on its experience and the end goal is for the student to go and explore on his/her own.

For me it is always important to look at the things that did not work and how I can improve it. This doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated when I don’t get what I want, but instead of saying “I’m a failure” I say: “Ok that didn’t work how can we improve it”.

Go back to the drawing board as many times as you need

I hope you enjoy this video as much as I did and I will love to hear your comments about it.

Fun fact: I never played Super Mario until I was older. Growing up I was not very into video games 😅

The Super Mario Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mClJBTz9I6U&t=38s