Interactivity

This chapter examines the concept of interactivity, or meaningful decision making, as a pillar of the challenge based learning approach. This is part of a broader notion of exploration within active learning—meaningful decisions that lead to different outcomes. Interactive learning can take many different forms, through human moderated activities (discussions, in class and asynchronous activities), via technology (sims, learning games) and can even be embedded in otherwise static media such as learning materials that ask students to pause, reflect on a question or perform an independent task. Interactivity has been imported into the challenge model via game based learning and research around games generally. There have been different attempts to define games what games are, much of which is too technical to be of use in a learning context, but the idea of interactivity via exploration is one that is useful in understanding and designing meaningful learning experiences. This chapter and the two that follow it highlight key pillars of the challenge based learning model—interactivity, motivation through play and adaptive difficulty.