In this blog series, we’re exploring the value of skills practice and how to design learning experiences that are land, by dialling in the experience itself. Our work across learning and immersive entertainment has taught us a lot about what keeps people genuinely engaged.

There are three key components:

• Staging and framing
• Cognitive load and flow
• Collaboration and team dynamics

Last time, we looked at how staging and framing get learners into the right mindset, transporting them quickly from the real world in to simulated environments to prepare them for realistic skills practice.

In this post we’ll be exploring how what we’ve learned about cognitive load and flow from immersive game design helps us to maintain an appropriate level of challenge and desire to achieve mastery in learning solutions.

Balancing challenge and engagement

Gamers know that challenge should be earned, not inflicted.

An experience needs to be difficult enough to create a sense of achievement. But if that difficulty curve spikes too high and frustration sets in (hands up if you’ve ever thrown a controller across the room).

At the other end of the scale, if a game is too easy, engagement plummets. In eLearning, this is the classic “click-click-click, no-reading-whatsoever” phenomenon where learners brute force their way to the end to achieve a completion.

But get the balance right and you unlock flow. Gamer or not, you’ve almost certainly felt it: being fully focused, absorbed, and in the zone.

So how do you create that balance?

Build challenge in the flow

You want to get your participants into the flow state as soon as possible. But lengthy tutorials or instructions right beforehand are liable to kill the mood. Ideally, you teach as they go – but this can be tricky when you’ve got a mix of abilities.

Yet it’s something that F1® DRIVE handles brilliantly.

This high-octane karting experience is the closest many of us will ever get to actually flying along an F1 track. Some participants arrive as superfans, already familiar with concepts like drag reduction system (DRS) and eager to optimise their performance.

Others walk in knowing very little and they need to get to grips with the controls and features quickly.

F1® DRIVE solves this with a compact, cleverly designed steering wheel. All the information drivers need about the kart’s features, their track position, lap times, flags, is displayed concisely. Rather than relying on a pre-race tutorial, drivers receive instructions and real time training at the point of need.

Meanwhile, more knowledgeable or experienced drivers can simply get on with mastery – slipping straight into their flow.

Building flow in learning

Now, learning experiences usually aren’t always as adrenaline-filled as go-karting. But flow is still critical in keeping participants engaged with a topic.

For Vodafone, we created DriveSafe, a mobile app that uses minigames to build safer driving habits. The games had to strike the right balance between challenge and accessibility, especially with a rollout across more than 25 countries.

The minigames were designed to be easy to play, but a challenge to master – delivering a steadily increased awareness of safe driving techniques as the learner quickly progresses from competency to mastery. This allowed the solution to be effective for novices and experienced drivers alike.

Replayability, score chasing, competitions and leaderboards sparked strong engagement – resulting in tens of thousands of gameplay hours from more than 3,000 learners.

When you build challenge thoughtfully in to your learning solutions and give people reasons to return, they’ll voluntarily come back to it motivated to achieve mastery in a way that will genuinely change real world behaviours, and not just check off their completion.

We hope you’ve found this short summary of how the techniques we use to manage cognitive load and achieve flow in immersive entertainment can be transferred to the world of learning.

Next time we’ll look at collaboration and team dynamics within gaming and learning experiences.