Picking up the theme of gaming, Marian Petre found teenagers using readily available Internet resources to engage in playful navigation and reuse of the information space. Examples:

• Pseudo-Friend – create a person in Facebook and see how many friends they can attract
• Brimstone Rhetoric – justify any position of argument using biblical quotes
• Degrees of Separation – How many links it takes to get from one concept or another
• Way Finding – Navigate to a designated destination using only the most-zoomed view on Google Maps
• Tower of Babel – Use online translators in order to hold conversations in a language you don’t know.

Such games are creative inventive or imaginative. They require, or help develop critical thinking, problem solving or some computational nous. They tend to be mischievous, mildly rebellious or satirical.

Can we bring mischief to the aid of education? Part of intelligent play is that it crossed boundaries and breaks a few rules. Is there a way to bring this into education and still make it compelling?

Petre, M. (2011) Intelligent games. ACM Inroads, (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education), 2 (2).  ISSN 2153-2184.