Why can my neurodivergent students focus on video games but not school work?

Transcript

 Why can my neurodivergent students focus on video games but not schoolwork? So I was very excited to get to see this question. Earlier this year I was invited to give a talk on anything I wanted, and I happened to choose pretty much this exact topic. To be specific, it was about what games can teach us about setting neurodivergent kids up for success.

I often describe executive functioning difficulties as a disconnect between what you want your brain, your body to be doing and actually getting your system to carry those instructions out. So aspects of the situation can make it more or less likely that the intention actually makes it through the barrier.

And video games are usually full of features that enhance focus. With the Ava games, we see the characters and the art and the story having a big impact on the kids' engagement. But we can also take some lessons from game design that don't require you to have a brilliant creative team on hand. Games tend to break goals into pieces like quests or missions that have a clearly defined, achievable objective where you don't have to wait too long to see a satisfying outcome, and so the brain keeps getting its momentum refreshed by these little successes along the way.

Schoolwork usually isn't built with that kind of satisfying progress in mind, but it could be. One of my big points in my talk was that we might not be able to make every goal or assignment fun, but games have a lot to teach us about how to make them satisfying.

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