Tangential Learning: The Basics

Ever watch a movie where they hold you down and hit you in the face with the point? A lot of modern educational games are like that. Why don’t we want that? Because really, getting hit in the face is not very fun. So what’s the answer?

To enable and facilitate learning rather than to educate...  (I think the rest of this article is going to be deconstructing that sentence.)

So what does it mean to educate? In this context ‘to educate’ is to set out with the goal of teaching a person a specific thing. Games like the Math Blaster or Dafur is Dying or even Typing of the Dead take this approach. The problem with this approach is that it’s laborious, heavy handed, and often slower/less effective than just picking up a textbook or newspaper.

Study after study has shown that kids and adults alike assimilate information better when they are studying topics which they are interested in rather than things which they are forced to learn for school or work. The real failing of the above approach is that it simply attempts to jazz up things which the user doesn’t inherently care about rather than trying to get them engaged in the topic, caring in a personal way.

The advantage that traditional video games have is that the user inherently cares about what they are doing. This enthusiasm is (comparatively) easy to channel or transfer to other activities, which brings us to the topic of tangential learning.

Tangential learning is not what you learn by being taught but rather what you learn by being exposed to things in a context which you are already highly engaged in. The simplest example is, of course, film. I’ll use The 300 as an example. That film was hardly intended to educate and yet everyone I know now knows who Leonidas is (though I think I’m still the only one who knows what it says on his tomb...).

The film didn’t educate, it served to stir discussion and spur interest. People who knew anything about the battle of Thermopylae would naturally disseminate that information in conversation in a way that was palatable and acceptable to their peers. Additionally this simply exposed people to something they didn’t know they were interested in, which is one of the often one of the biggest barriers to learning.

I knew several people who googled The 300 and ended up at the Wikipedia page for the historical battle of Thermopylae. This spidering of ideas and correlation of interests is what tangential learning is all about.
(And we haven’t even discussed the people who simply said to themselves, “This Leonidas guy is pretty cool...I’d like to learn about him.”)

So, Tangential Learning is simply the idea that some portion of your audience will self educate if you can facilitate their introduction to topics they might like in a context they already find exciting and engaging. Is this enough?

First, my answer is an emphatic yes. It costs nothing, it does some good.

Second, my answer is, “No, there is more we can do.”