About a year ago Mark Rober (a former NASA engineer) asked his YouTube followers to play a simple computer programming puzzle that he made with his buddy.
He told them that he wanted to prove that anyone from any background could learn to code. Fifty thousand of them took the challenge. But the truth was he didn’t care about proving that everyone could learn to code.
He was trying to figure out the role of fun factor in the learning process.
To be able to do that he added a little bit of stress for half the participants. He randomly served two slightly different versions of puzzles.
The only difference between the two versions was that in one version if they failed they didn’t lose any points but in the other version they lost five points. In both versions, the participants were given 200 points to start with.
When he analyzed the data he discovered that the success rate for those who were penalized for failed attempts was around 52%. But the success rate for those who were not penalized was 68%.
A difference of 16% was too much to believe.
But the answer came to him when he analyzed another piece of data — the number of attempts to solve the puzzle.
Those who were penalized gave up after 5 tries but those who were not penalized tried 12 times or more.
In other words, those who didn’t see failure in a negative light tried two and a half times more to solve the puzzle. As a result, they got more success and therefore learned more.
This was an astounding discovery. They had accidentally stumbled upon something significant. The trick to learning more is finding the right way to frame the learning process.
How to frame the learning process to learn more?
There are three things you can do:
1. Make failure a part of the learning process.
2. Shift the focus to fun.
3. Make the environment conducive to learning.
1. Make failure a part of the learning process.
If you canframe the learning processin such a way where failure doesn’t bother you can learn much more and have a lot of fun in the process.
There is real evidence of that in real life. Toddlers are constantly trying new things. When they learn to walk they don’t think about how dumb they might look if they fall. They fall, again and again, and they don’t get scolded by their parents either. Instead, the parents encourage them to try again and again.
Toddlers’ focus is on learning to walk. By constantly trying, failing, and retrying they learn to walk.
2. Shift the focus to fun
When Super Mario Bros. came out, people were obsessed with it. They wanted to get to the castle and rescue the beautiful Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. Kids will get to school and ask each other, “What level did you make it to? Did you pass the game?”
They never asked each other about the different ways they might have died.
When playing these games, after jumping into a pit, no one thinks, “I am so ashamed; that was such a failure, I am never going to try again.”
What really happens is that they make a mental note, “I’ve got to remember there’s a pit there; next time, I’m going to come out with a little more speed and jump a bit later.”
By shifting our focus on the fun we can trick our brain and learn more. Science supports it too.
Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too.
Judy Will calls it the RAD effect in her paper The Neuroscience of Joyful Education. RAD is the acronym that explains the science behind the fun factor.
R stands for Reticular Activating System, A for Amygdala,and D for Dopamine. It happens in three steps.
● Novelty promotes information transmission through the Reticular activating system.
● Stress-free learning propels data through the Amygdala’s effective filter.
● Pleasurable associations linked with learning are more likely to release more dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the memory centers and promotes the release of acetylcholine, which increases focused attention.
You can add novelty by creating a stress-free environment for learning.
3. Make the environment conducive to learning.
For some reason, most of the learning environments are designed like classrooms. Whether they are workshops, seminars, or group learning sessions; they are set up is like a school, demanding conformity and rigidity. Something that language teacher Michel Thomas renowned for his unconventional but successful ways of teaching is trying to break.
If you look at Michel Thomas’s video on YouTube, you’ll notice something quite odd. He has been given a bunch of very challenging students (a mixed bag in other words) and his job is to get them started speaking French. The video starts with students in the classroom but they are not learning the language.
Instead, Thomas gets them to do something entirely unexpected.
He gets then to move furniture. The students move sofas, tables, chairs and screens to create an atmosphere that is more like a lounge room rather than a classroom. Once the barrier between the teacher and student is broken, the conversation starts. Add food and coffee to the mix and students will be using French words and remember them much more easily. There will be no shame in incorrect pronunciation or not remembering the new words. The mistakes will be laughed off real learning will happen.
Thomas says, “learning should never be work. Instead, it should be a pleasure”.
You can change the environment for self-learning too. Rather than sitting in a library (or classroom) go to a park or cafe. Rather than reading alone, take along a friend. Explain to your friend what you have just read. You will read with more concentration and you will never forget what you have explained to someone in your own words.
I have covered a lot, lets recap.
The trick to learning more is finding the right way to frame the learning process.
If you can change your learning process in such a way that the failure is part of the learning process (a child learning to walk), your focus is on having fun (like saving the princess in a game) and your environment stress-free and novel (from a classroom or a library to a loungeroom or a cafe) you can enhance your learning many folds.
There you go.
Add some fun to your learning process and you will learn much more.
Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash
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