Designing for Group Flow in Collaborative Cross-Platform Learning Experiences

Technological resources have expanded the goal of education from individual knowledge acquisition to include the development of critical thinking, communication, and collaboration (Griffin, McCaw, Care, 2012; Van Roekel, 2014). This shift requires a reevaluation of what students learn (e.g. content versus skills) and how students learn in formal education settings (Saavedra & Opfer, 2012). Thus, there is a critical need to find ways to create environments that enable embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded learning and develop critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. MIT’s Education Arcade and the MIT Game Lab are exploring ways to meet this need by developing a cross-platform, collaborative educational game with a conceptual focus on cellular biology and a developmental focus on 21st century skills. To this end, we are creating learning environments that incorporate collaborative problem solving that are connected across different contexts.