"Geared" up to learn

Yesterday while sitting in the pediatrician's waiting room, baby sleeping in the carrier, iPhone annoyingly not picking up a signal, I played with a game on my phone. I hadn't played the game in a while, and it was reset back at the first level. Thus, I got to experience it fresh (although with some knowledge that I did not have the first time).

The game was Geared. It's a fairly simple game in which you begin with two gears on the edges of the screen, one moving and one not, and a set number of interim gears of various sizes that you drop onto the screen, using virtual gravity as a force, in an attempt to connect the first two gears and create a chain of turning gears.

One thing I was struck by as I contemplated the game yesterday was the way in which the game teaches you how to play along the way. The concepts build slowly. First you drop in one gear, in an obvious (middle) position. As you move through levels you're led to new concepts: connecting multiple gears, dealing with the force of gravity while placing gears, placing big gears along tangents so they can effectively close small gaps, etc.

This is how good self-paced multimedia programs work, I think. They don't overwhelm you with directions up front (and who pays attention to those anyway -- HELLO temporal contiguity), but rather embed them. You learn the system/technology as you learn the content. The cognitive load focused on learning the system is secondary and minimal throughout.

Games in general excel at this type of self-teaching simplicity. Instructional multimedia, not so much. But the fields are merging in many ways (or, perhaps better put, instruction is learning from gaming).

On a closing note, here's a youtube video showing the solutions to the various Geared levels. I'm not watching it (just saw the first few screens) because I'm trying to play the game in my spare moments and I like the challenge. However, it might make this concept of which I speak (write) here a bit more vivid for you.