What makes learning fun?

Fun in Learning

This section will be more meta than others, as the ideas here apply to all formsof learning, including Paragogy, Pedagogy and Andragogy. Idea, or question rather, being, as was posed to me at a recent social event "What makes learning fun?" (Wilder Cusick, private communication, 29 October 2011).

What is it about learning how to make your skateboard float in the air for a split second that will motivate a teenager to invest hours of their time studying the mechanics of the trick, not to even mention the physcial pain that comes with failure? Especially if that same student could not pay attention for more than 2 minutes at a time during Chemisty and spends less time than that trying their homework before giving-up?

Why is learning skateboarding fun for her and chemistry not?

Part of it relates to motivation. Skateboarding is most likely primarly intrinsically motivated, with some extrinsic motivation coming from the respect they'd receive from peers if they mastered the trick. Chemistry would be the reverse, mostly the motivation would be extrinsic, coming from parents and society's expectations that the student do well in their studies and get into a posh college, or their future will be doom. The student very well could be intrinsically motivated to have a high report card for their own vanity, but even then, chemisty is not done for the sake of learning chemistry, but because they need that high grade as part of their overall portfolio.

Taken a different way, what is it about chemistry that's fun for those who love the science? Do they want the respect, power and prestige that comes from being the one to announce a new breakthrough? Or, is it akin to "art for art's sake" and they love doing chemistry just for the sake of doing it? Instead do they feel their work is important for the greater good, or prosperity, of humanity? That they are contributing, somehow?

Perhaps more specifically, is it the act of learning that can be in, itself fun? Or is it the rewards that come from successfully applying said knowledge being studied that is fun? How would this apply, say, in the context of learning how to be intimate with your partner? Is that fun?

Tangentially, why did some of the original masters of Judo, feel it would lose something if it were to become a competetive sport with scoring, as opposed to just a Japanese martial art?

Certainly learning is a highly individual endeavor and what works pour moi, may hurt you in your studies. That understood between us, I will attempt an ad hoc list of what (I think) makes learning fun for me. I welcome your ideas.


 * Learning something it is possible for me to understand. Even though it wasn't fun for me as a kid, I do now enjoy studying Japanese. The majority of the language is beyond me, but because I have a sound footing and confidence I can figure out the next step of what I do not know, it is usually fun. Its especially fun learning while drinking with colleagues in a bar, and less so sitting by myself trying to master hiragana. On the other side, while I would love to comprehend Galileo's The Assailer translated from Italian into Japanese both to show off my Nihonogo skills and to see the skies better, sitting down to try and slog through the book alone does not sound like what I want to do after an 8 hour day.
 * Learning is ESPECIALLY fun if I'm studying something as a way to procrastinate from another assignment that is due. I have never been known to passively study accounting concepts in my free time, but you can be sure I will have fun learning some tangential fruit of the accounting tree, so long as its unrelated to the accounting exam I am cramming for tomorrow.
 * Learning that has value for me in my immediate reality, today, now. Learning fun new Japanese words living in Japan was cool. The idea of learning fun, new Japanese words has not motivated me much since I left. I think this concept is especially important to consider, given how our culture places so much value on the stark reality check students undergo moving from the world of school to the real world. I am not sure how to properly articulate this, but I believe this constant preparing students for some unseeable, mysterious future as opposed to knowledge usable in their daily existence is not optimal. Certainly there are things necessary to learn for the real world, but I think students would be better served realizing whether you are in school or not they're part of the “real world” and should be learning helpful things in that vein.
 * It helps if learning is “cool” i.e. getting tips on how to navigate a snowboard down a hill was more fun for me than my Dad showing me the proper way to buff the car's leather seats as a child.
 * There's also the learning thats fun, but only later. It was not fun in the moment for me to sit and make a 30 page reading journal for Frankenstein, or to re-write essays four times for my high-school English teacher. Now, though writing is fun for me and learning how to write better is fun because of those experiences. Perhaps for anything there's a certain pain threshold one has to endure to get the basics of a concept before learning it can be fun? And depeneding on the difficulty and/or how that threshold is reached (alone, with a peer, with a good teacher, with a bad teacher) determines for me whether or not that is fun?