Active Learning: What It Is and How to Do It

This article Paper Plane by M.I.A talked about and compared learning in a virtual world through playing a video game and real-life situation, for example, learning in a classroom. Von Croy was teaching Lara how to play the video game "Tomb Raider" using technical terms like push forward and jump. This technical term as the author narrates represent a fundamental and crucial learning principle which learners in real-world ignored in schools (M.I.A). In the real world, learners cannot do much with overt information that the teacher told them outside the context not unless information about the context is given. Von Croy's mixed language encourages the player to relate, juxtapose, and melds her real-world identity and virtual identity of the character she is playing in the virtual world game. 

The articles further narrate that children who take responsibility for the sort of virtual classroom scientist will relate this proactively in their real-world identities are engaged in real learning. As the training continues, Von Croy introduced the learning principle of applying skills learned in the earlier versions. For instance, the subdomain of the real game where fundamental learning gets done and built as a simplified version of the same world in which a player will live to tackle the current situation. In this principle, Learners both in video games and classroom are not overtly aware that they are learning how difficult it is as learners are embedded in a domain which gets progressively harder. 

The principle of transfer knowledge came in when learners start facing new challenges where their routinized skills don't apply. In this case, the learner transfers prior knowledge mixed with innovation to tackled these new challenges (M.I.A). Learners call on experiences they have had in other games and adapting them to the current circumstances. There is little success in doing this in school. 

Reference 

M.I.A Paper Plane, Music Cultural Studies, Immigration studies