Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.14.10 | Earlier this year, Spotlight asked Digital Media & Learning experts gathered in San Diego at the Digital Media & Learning conference what innovation they’d like to see in education. Drew Davidson, director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, led the charge with his call for embracing failure as a learning device in classrooms.

“The best way to get to a good idea,” Davidson says, “is to fail faster.  You iterate through your design ideas and work your way toward the best solution.”

His ideas were so intriguing, we checked back later to see how he was putting this idea to work.

We also talked with Katie Salen, executive director at the Institute of Play, who is putting that concept to work in a new public charter school in New York called Quest2Learn. The school uses the concepts of video game design to re-imagine learning, and “fast failure” is a big part of it. Salen talks more about the ideas behind Quest2Learn in the accompanying podcast.