I describe the research of Carol Dweck and Lisa Trei from Stanford and connect it to game-base learning in children. Essentially, the oral feedback a child gets will have profound cognitive effects and either improve or hazard learning. Children can develop and intrinsic or extrinsic love for solving problems in just a few minutes based on the teachers type of feedback.

1. Embracing Paradoxes and Narratives in
Education
By Eugene Sheely
© E V Sheely 2014
“In the realm of strategy, only contradiction and paradox work.
Common sense and straightforward linear logic always
fails” - Edward Luttwak
According to Charles Handy, success belongs to those who learn to embrace
complexity by reconciling the contradictions of this world. Gabe Zichermann
gives an example of these contradictions with gamification: If you want to
design a great educational game, focusing on making it educational as the
main priority will make your game fail. These paradoxes are crucial in
understanding the neuralpsychological theory of Ian H. Robertson when he
says that praising a child for his intelligence will eventually have him
believing he’s stupid (or even make him so).
Neuroscience is now discovering the tremendous effect a good narratives has
on the formation of our brain circuitry. One impact of these narratives is
developing what’s called “Fixed” and “Growth” mindset towards
intelligence. Brain scans show that children having these different mindsets
have their brains wired in different ways, which have huge learning impacts.
Robertson explains some findings:

2. Fixed Mindset: They believe people are born with a specific intelligence and
there’s nothing that can be done about it.
A child with this mindset will experience a flash of electricity when told his
answer is wrong, which means he’s having an identity crisis. His brain is
interpreting the wrong answer as evidence that he might not be as smart, and
may end up believing he’s stupid. When told the correct answer there’s very
little brain activity, meaning he has not stored the correct answer, he has a
learning disability.
Growth Mindset: They believe people’s intelligence can rise or fall
depending on their effort or negligence on improving it.
A child with this mindset will experience little brain activity when told his
answer is wrong, which means there’s no threat to his or hers self-perception
if they fail. But interesting enough, when told the correct answer, a burst of
electricity rushes across the brain, which means he’s stored the correct
answer, he’s learning.
These two different mindsets will literally rewire their brains differently and
either create an unconscious learning disability or learning predisposition.
Game based learning in general creates a growth mindset. In games failure is
a process of discovery, it’s fun to struggle to solve a problem. That’s the core
of games: Dopamine rewards for learning and solving problems. Traditional
learning tends to create a fixed mindset, a context were getting a wrong
answer is dreaded. A Stanford study by Carol Dweck and Lisa Trei shows
how you can generate these different mindsets through either praising a kid

3. for being smart (creates fixed mindsets) or on their effort (creates growth
mindsets).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTXrV0_3UjY
To summarize the video: fifth graders were given a series of puzzles which at
first were easy to solve and were either praised for their intelligence or their
effort. Once the different mindsets were created they gave the kids a set of
much harder problems. The fixed mindset kids thought that encountering
difficulty in a problem meant they weren’t smart, their confidence dropped
and they wanted to go back to the easy problems. The growth mindset kids
on the other hand had fun with the complex problems. They felt smart trying
to solve them and making progress (importance in feedback), while seeing
setbacks as a need to work on their effort or strategy, not a sign of their
intelligence.

4. Our brains are hardwired to learn from trial and error (more on this in a
future post), so avoiding mistakes will put the kid on a serious disadvantage.

5. But it also gets weirder: Having a growth mindset becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Gabe Zichermann talks about a study revealing that juggling will
increase gray matter, which meant learning any new task will make you
smarter. Games are all about learning! A proper gamified educational
program with fun mechanics and a narrative focused on creating a growth
mindset will literally rewire the brain into a learning machine. The more you
learn, the smarter you get. This predisposition towards self-development and
learning through a growth mindset might be one of the greatest gifts we can
give a child.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300
games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot
and missed. ..I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed“ - Michael Jordan