One of the key things I look for when I’m delivering learning events is whether the people around me appear to be having fun. It’s the same with designing new learning environments. Part of my “Is this good design?” checklist is whether it offers both facilitator and learner the opportunity to enjoy the learning process.

I don’t know where this “fun’s important” approach came from but perhaps it’s a reaction to the long, mind-numbingly boring classroom hours that characterise much of my own education. I never wanted a repeat of those experiences so why should I inflict them on anybody else? Wherever it came from, I can’t remember a time when “ People learn best when they’re having fun” wasn’t a part of my professional vocabulary.

Today I was browsing the subject of the Personalisation of Learning when I came across a fascinating chapter by Manfred Spitzer. The chapter is part of the OECD book Personalising Education (2006) and is called Brain Research and Learning Over the Life Cycle. As the title suggests the subject area is what we know about the function of the brain and how this should translate into educational practice aimed at different age groups.

There’s a lot of good stuff in this chapter, but the real “Eureka!” moment for me came when I read the part that deals with the way we attach emotions to what we learn, and how this affects our ability to remember it (always a pretty important feature of any learning design!).

In short, when something is learned in an environment that allows us to attach positive emotions to it, we store the memory in one part of our brain, the hippocampus: where the associated emotion is negative we store the memory in a different part of the brain, the amygdala. The learning in our hippocampus then transfers over time to the brain cortex where long-term memory happens. Conversely the amygdala is the part of our brain where fast learning and future avoidance of unpleasant events is controlled – learning what not to do. Thus our reaction to the associated memory is not about creatively applying it to our future lives – it’s about never getting into the situation of ever having to apply it!

Not at all what we want as learning designers.

So it seems that, intuitively, I was right all along – people do learn best when they are having fun: and I’d say that that’s a pretty big message for anyone setting out to design any kind of learning experience.

Experiential Learning, learner engagement, learning, Learning Design, Lifelong Learning