ENGAMEMENT

What Is Engamement?

Engamement refers to a state of psychological and cognitive absorption with a digital game, toy, or digital technology. Children who are “engamed” are involved in their activity in such a way that focus, interest, and learning are amplified. Engamement refers specifically to children’s interaction with digital technologies and may be thought of as a parallel to children’s rapt absorption in reading, practicing a musical instrument or being “in the zone” while playing a sport. 

Digital technologies have characteristics that increase levels of psychological and cognitive absorption in tasks. These include the ability to provide immediate audio and visual feedback, a balance between challenges and skills, and high levels of stimulation.  These technologies are non-didactic and practice-based; rules are learned through practice and play, rather than through a set of formal directions. Digital technologies are adaptable and provide regular feedback regarding one’s progress in the form of scores and other metrics of progress. They allow for creativity, the process of new identities, and learning a new type of technical literacy. 

How Is Engamement Important?

Engamement facilitates children’s ability to tolerate frustration, make mistakes and learn from them, and persist in tasks that may be challenging and difficult. Children generally have a sense of control that reduces concerns that others may see them as failing. Children’s involvement with digital technologies is often self-initiated, lowering concerns regarding compliance and participation. When children are fully “engamed” with their digital technology, they may experience a sense of “flow” in which distractions are excluded from their consciousness, the activity becomes an end in and of itself, and action and awareness are merged.

Children’s engamement increases levels of sustained attention and effort.  An enhanced willingness to step back and observe their actions while engamed and to discuss their thinking and behavioral strategies is often evident. Essentially, it intensifies the learning opportunities and helps to consolidate the thinking skills that go into their problem solving. 

Translating Engamement to Learning

At its most basic level, an activity that is fun and stimulating is likely to be retained and extended when compared to material that does not engage the learner. Kids will simply tell you that it’s more fun to learn when playing a video game, watching an exciting educational television program, or looking at something on the Internet. Most often they are referring to learning content. Using digital technologies to teach learning skills, however, may often go unnoticed. The key to LearningWorksforKids is helping children to step back from their engamement and to reflect on their thinking and, most importantly, learn how to apply these skills to the real world..

Guides and strategies to helping kids make these connections are provided in our website.  These strategies work best when a child is truly absorbed in the task at hand. It is important to note that the children tend to differ in the tasks that they find absorbing, and it is incumbent upon parents and teachers to find digital games and technologies that best fit an individual child.