Lecture: Similarities between game design and instructional design

On July 10th 2012, I gave a lecture about the similarities between designing a game and designing a lesson in classroom, at one of the biggest educational conferences in Israel: IUCEL Meital.

the lecture strove to show that educational and instructional design could learn from game design at how to tangle the users into the web of curiosity, challenge and fun.
I talked about 9 main design principals in the game design theory that can be used also in instructional design:

1. the player as the Messiah. let the user feel that without him the session cannot be over. if the user will not make the right move, nothing will happen. make sure you put it all into a good story.
2. rules. setup rules for the game/ lesson. only when you have rules, the users will try and break them. without rules, they will try and break the teacher... 
3. feeling of control. let the user feel they are in control, but actually you should control all the possible routes and choices they could make.
4. immediate feedback. give feedback as fast as you can, as precise as possible.
5. goals. setup big goals and smaller goals to keep the users on track.
6. balance the amount of content. no content is boring. too much content confuse.
7. balance the challenge and the ability. don't be afraid to challenge your users, just make sure they feel competent to the task. 
8. develop the feeling of success. make sure your users succeed. after a hard task, give an easy one.
9. reflection. always assist the user to reflect their performance.

my presentation for download (hebrew).
all other lectures' from the conference can be downloaded as well (hebrew).