Abstract
This chapter draws on the theory of Thomas Malone and describes a number of features of intrinsically motivating environments, such as responsiveness, curiosity, challenge, and fantasy. These features include competing theories about what makes computer games fun and how interactions with computer games can lead to further learning. An activity is intrinsically motivating if the learners are engaged in it for their own sake. However, no single instructional game can be expected to appeal to everybody. An accountable environment permits the learners to explore freely and make full use of their capacities for discovering relations of various kinds. Making learning more fun will produce corresponding increases both in learning and retention and in subsequent interest in the subject matter itself. This chapter will also provide examples of intrinsically motivating instructions in science, based on different environmental features.
No compulsory learning can remain in the soul…. In teaching children, train them by a kind of game, and you will be able to see more clearly the natural bent of each (Plato, The Republic, Book VII).
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Sawyer, R. K. (Ed.). (2014). The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence conduct research on how people and computers can work together more intelligently: http://cci.mit.edu/.
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Svendsen, B., Burner, T., Røkenes, F.M. (2020). Intrinsically Motivating Instruction—Thomas Malone. In: Akpan, B., Kennedy, T.J. (eds) Science Education in Theory and Practice. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43620-9_4
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