Game Based Learning: Dogwood Trail

Prompt:

Dogwood Lane is such a pleasant walk. The flowering trees are beautiful. When I see the opening to a Cave, just down the hill from where the path turns, visions of cool subterranean beauty come to mind as the perfect complement to this trek in the sunshine that is starting to get a little bit warm. Someone has carved "Csikzentmihalyi" into the stone by the cave entrance.What does that mean? You go explore for a few minutes...
You carefully creep into the Cave Entrance. Is there something stuck in that small hole over there?


Cave:
Cave Entrance

   In  Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi's book Flow the author takes the time to define happiness in the eyes of psychology.  Csikzentmihalyi believes that happiness is out interpretation of outside events.  It is not something that happens to us, but rather something we, as individuals, prepare and cultivate for.  Once we have the ability to control our inner experience we can determine whether or not an event or sequence of events makes us happy.

     Csikzentmihalyi goes one to describe what he calls the optimal experience.  He does not view this experience as the times we have to relax and sit down.  Rather, he believes these are the times when we have control of our actions and are masters of our own fate. 

     Flow, the title of the book, is defined as the state at which people are so engrossed with what they are doing nothing else seems to matter. The author wrote this book on flow and optimal experience so that it could be the first book presented to the general reader. 

Review: 

     Reading Csikzentmihalyi's work in light of having read McGonigal drives me more to have a game based learning classroom (dependant on my schools expectations and restrictions).  Csikzentmihalyi's insights through the lens of psychology are very similar to those presented by McGonigal.  

     People find happiness whiled doing what they love, not while doing nothing.  We are happy when we are achieving a goal and being productive.  Both authors have pointed this out.