Tetris, badges, and learning pathways
I was listening to the always-excellent Song Exploder podcast in the gym the other day when I came across a bit that really made me stop and think.
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If you fast-forward to about 3:04 you’ll hear the artist RJD2 talk about his approach to song writing being influenced by studying Mathematics in college. Fascinatingly, he talks about music in spatial terms – suggesting that, like me, he may be mildly synaesthetic. RJD2 imagines music as being like a game of Tetris where you can dictate the shape of any of the pieces.
As an educator, I find this intriguing. If we imagine the falling tetris blocks to be the things that learners have to assimilate, then it’s easy to see how problematic it can be to neither being in control of their ‘shape’ nor the speed at which they come at you.
What if we handed that over to learners? And what if each block was a badge along a learning pathway?
Image CC BY-SA s. bär
