The goal in this chapter is to introduce how we think the logic of tracking found in video games is a useful way to think about how students track many varieties of information and larger ideas. The authors explain how thinking about learning in the same way we think about video games will help students to grasp important ways to understand and communicate. They show how tracking games are tools to aid in the understanding of seminal thinkers in a variety of fields. They provide examples of games that can be used to reinforce the logic of tracking from philosophy, literature, anthropology, physics, logic, and linguistics.
TopTracking To Learn
We have seen in Part One that when it comes to digital technology and classical learning goals, it is more important to hew to the spirit of the technology than to its letter. We have proposed, in extensor, not that students get a Twitter account and tweet away but that they adapt the Twitter format and exchange to make words count, find essential ideas, and debate them with concision. The same—spirit versus letter—applies to Part Two. We are not advocating that students rush out and play video games. Rather, we say that students have grown up with them, have a mindset attuned to them, and, applying the spirit of these games, can game—and track—their way in order to achieve traditional learning goals. In Part One those goals mean an efficient eloquence in language and the distinction between the essential and the inessential. In Part Two those goals mean a capacity to apply ideas in different settings and discover, as the settings fight against the original ideas, new ideas. Another name for this process is “dialectic,” and the essential dialectic in the process will turn out to be Traditional Learning Goals in one corner and The Spirit of Games in the other corner, and the synthesis will be the sorts of Tracking Games we will outline and detail here. So let us get started.