10th October 2025
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM VIDEO GAMES? If you have ever delved beyond Hollywood you will find a whole world of originality beyond the formulaic Marvel Franchise’s, remakes and sequels. And if originality is your thing you won’t be disappointed by the outstanding Run Lola Run; a German offering that introduced us to the wonderful anti-hollywood stereotype challenging heroine, Franke Potente.
each level gets progressively harder and requires a more complex set of skills, knowledge and understanding to complete. Each level introduces some new learning that must be mastered before moving on and in each level you revisit learning and skills from the earlier levels.
In the best games the player is put into a state of flow. Flow, or what you might call ‘in the zone’ is that moment when you are fully absorbed Run Lola Run is a film of second chances, about and engaged in an activity; when time becomes trying again. It presents to us a sequence of abstract and passes at a faster rate; when you get events told three times over. With each iteration lost in yourself. This is the utopia we all search it is almost as if the character of Lola has learnt for in our teaching – a class full of learners fully from the previous version and adapts her absorbed by the learning, engaged in a state of approach slightly. This slight change in approach flow and constantly being challenged. Flow is has an implication for the rest of the interactions probably what you see at home through a child in that sequence. Watching the film you feel like that won’t come down for their dinner because you are watching someone playing a video game they fully are absorbed in a game. and learning from their mistakes as they repeat the same level. Flow is a key part of video game theory, but how do video games so successfully manage to As a computer science teacher I have often shared achieve flow? It is all about managing the level of my love for video games. They are often a feature challenge with the level of skill, knowledge and of my lessons and my assemblies. Often lauded understanding. as a distraction; as anti-social; as brain numbing and responsible for so many of society’s ills, a love for the genre could be a risky indulgence to admit to. However, I believe that we can learn a lot fromvideo games. Some of the most satisfying and engaging teaching I have received has been from a video game. Allow me to indulge you for a moment. You see, video games have mastered several elements essential to great teaching: Let’s imagine the flow diagram above represents engagement, challenge, choice, differentiation a sequence of learning and each world/level and feedback. Most games are based on levels; is a discrete component (a lesson, key topic or