In today's post, friend and colleague Kevin Eikenberry writes: "We are learning beings. I believe that learning is one of the things that truly makes us most fulfilled in life. And fulfillment brings some amazing fun...We should do all we can to make the learning process more enjoyable and fun. And we need to remember that learning - both the process and the result - is fun itself." It's a key insight, one that I've spent many an hour sharing with everyone I can find - that learning is fun in itself. And that though we should be doing everything we can to make learning more fun, we must affirm and be guided by the knowledge that learning is inherently fun, and perhaps the best thing we can do is make sure we are not standing in the way of that fun.

This is in addition to a wonderful little article he wrote called "Why Fun Aids Learning and What You Can Do About It." Where he takes a more traditional perspective, focusing on what: "you can do to incorporate more fun into the learning you lead and your personal learning." Here are his five suggestions:

Learn with others. Students know that studying together in a group can be a good strategy. This can be true of us as adults too. Read a book and talk about it with others (it works for Oprah!). Get three or four people together to work on your next presentation. Do a project as a team. The results, enjoyment and learning will likely all go up.

Plan for fun. If you are doing a presentation or training, use an exercise to lighten up the session. Warning – don’t do this just for the fun – make sure you connect it to the lessons or message of the session.

Laugh and learn. The next time you make a mistake, laugh about your foible! While you are reflecting on and laughing about, your mistake, think about what you can learn from the mistake. Use the learning and the laughter to ensure the mistake isn’t repeated.

Ask about it. When you’ve experienced something fun take a few minutes to see what you can learn from the fun. What made it fun? How can you repeat those elements in another situation or with other people?

Allow fun in. Things at work may be serious. The lesson you are trying to learn may be serious. But things can be serious and still enjoyable. When we allow fun in we can help the learning process and cement the learning. The efforts you make to lighten the spirit during a serious and important situation can be richly rewarded.

In addition to all this, Kevin is also announcing his "Special Limited Time Offer" in celebration of the publication of his wonderful book Vantagepoints on Learning and Life. A while ago, Kevin had sent me a copy of the book and asked for an endorsement. Here's what I wrote: "Reading Vantagepoints on Learning and Life is lioke sitting down next to somebody who is genuinely, thoroughly kind. Someone patient enough to listen deeply to you and to himself. Someone honest. Someone fun. Someone you can be quiet with. Someone very much like a friend." It amazes and somewhat saddens me that a book of such gentle wisdom needs to be promoted at all. But Kevin is wiser than I in the ways of marketing, and has gone to great lengths, not only to promote the book, but also to offer an almost overwhelming collection of "free gifts." All in the name of the fun that is learning.

Samorost2 is, as those of you who are sufficiently alert might be sorely tempted to conclude, the sequel to what has subsequently become known as "Samorost1." It is currently my preferred paradigm for a kinder, gentler, and far more whimsical synthesis of computers, games, learning, and art.

It's a puzzle-game, similar in principal to Myst - a series of "point-and-click" adventure puzzles. Only, unlike Myst, you can't really die, or even make a mistake. You just go on and on, pointing, clicking, observing, and clicking some more, until you figure out that clicking on this makes that do something which makes the other thing go where you want it to, and you find yourself somewhere you haven't been before.

Graphically, the game is often surprisingly beautiful. The music and sound effects complement the art - rich and enriching. Technically, it is filled with achievements (note especially the use of light) that are bar-raising. But, for me, it's the whimsy, the pervasive humor that keeps you from taking the game or your achievements in it too seriously. Even when you can't figure out what to do next (yes, each level has a code you can use so you can get back to it in case you have to go away for awhile, far, far away), you are constantly reminded that there's nothing really important here - just the fun.

It's the most successful of games from Amanita Design, founded by Jakub Dvorsky of the Czech Republic. It crosses many borders to come to us. And brings us a newer, and far more promising world to play in.

You can play it online, until you've run out of levels. You can buy it, get many more levels, and give yourself and your children yet one more license to play.

Brook Lawder, in her essay "Playgrounds and Classrooms," (Haverford College 2002), writes: "Before elementary school, I reveled in playing outside. I rarely watched television. I loved to read. Most importantly, however, I loved to invent. Creativity enthralled me. Everyday I had a new game invented. These games were not like hide-and-go-seek or freeze tag. They were much less ephemeral. My games lasted days, weeks even. They contained elaborate plot twists and super powers. Everyone on the playground played my games..."

Which reminded me of a 4th grade girl I observed, in a classroom in Philadelphia, about 35 years ago. She was this kind of game-creating, game-leading genius that Ms. Lawder describes herself as being. She used just about every technique I currently teach to the future playleaders of the world. She seemed to know exactly when to change the game, exactly how to keep everyone involved, exactly where to lead people so they'd have the most fun.

Being old enough to know the misfortunes that can befall such young geniuses of play, I read on, self-fulfillingly:

"I can pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped playing, stopped creating and inventing on my own schedule. It all started with homework. Homework was the destroyer of my childhood imagination. Melodramatic, I know, but so are most childhood memories. After pre-kindergarten, I began attending school fulltime. School began at eight in the morning and ended at three o'clock in the afternoon. Upon arriving home, the homework began. Dinner promptly concluded or interrupted homework. After dinner, if the homework was not complete, I sat down to finish the work. Bedtime arrived shortly afterwards. Everyday was like this. Even if I finished my homework early, it was usually dark and I was unable to play..."

My question is: who would actually want kids to stop playing? who would even think it possible? who could possibly think that it's better for kids to do homework than it is for them to be outside playing? The neighbors, maybe?

I quote on: "...One shining light continued to shine: recess. As long as I had recess I could continue my play and exercise my imagination. The older I grew, however, the more the time allotted for recess diminished. Recess became physical education. Such a scientific name for something that should be fun. The teachers were once again able to convert play into a set of rules associated with education. "

No, I think it's something else. Not education. (not even spelled the same way: "Capital-A-small-n-small-t-small-i-capital-F-small-un" vs. "Education"). A force. A perverse, childhood-denying, fuddy-duddy of a force. Not homework. Not educators, even. Something different. Something which I here-with and -by name "The AntiFun - the irrational repression of happiness."

Yes. Yes. A great wrong has been wrung. Less and less time for play. Less and less time for recess. And then recess became PE. And all play vanished. But no, no, Ms. Lawder, it isn't the teacher's doing. Or the parents or neighbors. It's a world held in sway by the AntiFun. And that's what it is.

Fiona Bailey and Julian Sefton-Green wanted to find out how they could take advantage of technology to help "make playful learning visible." They ended up researching "the use of video mobile phones as tools with which to engage groups of parents in documenting, sharing and reflecting upon aspects of their children’s learning outside of formal education settings." Such a simple premise, using a relatively ubiquitous technology to capture, document and discuss actual moments of children engaged in play-directed learning. It sensitizes parents to what is often, as the name of the project implies, invisible to them, and helps us all have a better understanding of the phenomenon of self-motivated learning (a phenomenon which our educational systems all too often ignore).

Skip down to the section describing example learning 'moments' with reflections. See for example: "Ben makes lines out of things – anything and everything...a line of toast crusts on the breakfast table, sent with no commentary or explanation. Laurie had noticed her son doing this on a number of occasions, but had not really thought too much about it until embarking on the project. Through documenting her son’s play, she began to notice a pattern - lines of toys, lines of dinosaurs – and now toast!"

This is life-changing stuff for parents, and for those of us who believe in the innate value of play.

Even fat people will eventually get fit - if it’s fun enough. Everybody knows that.

So, let’s say one day we decide to make fun the single and only purpose of each and every sport we play.

Let’s even say that from then that being good enough to join a sports team is based not on performance, but on how much fun everyone has.

What would be different? How would sports for fun differ from sports for whatever else sports are supposed to be for?

Most likely, you’d get a lot more people playing, even the people who not so skilled or able.

And, for the most part, the fun they’d be having would be in doing physical things, because people, for the most part, like being physical. People are known to have fun all by themselves, without the benefit of supervision.

And for an equally large part, it would be educational, because fun includes learning things about what we can make our bodies do, and what we can do with them together.
And people would play together, cross-boundaries, cross-abilities, cross-generations.
Or maybe we would be making up new sports, entirely, from equipment we never thought of using in a sport, like, oh, push brooms and panty hose and trash cans.

Sports to play for the fun of it. Sports without officials or trophies or stadiums. But real sports. Challenging, rewarding greater agility and deeper strength and more real teamwork sports.

OK I confess. I’m talking about Junkyard Sports, which happens to be the name of a book I wrote, just published by Human Kinetics. And it’s about sports that you pretty much make up as you go along and play simply and totally for the fun of it. Sports that have nothing at all to do with being fat or fit.

And not knowing that much about the politics and purposes of even professional sports, I find myself really, honestly wanting to know: what would be different if sports were all about fun? And why would it be different?

If sports were fun, fun and pretty much nothing but fun, what goals and objectives would not be met? Especially for the people who aren’t athletes, or competitive, or interested in traditional sports at all? And the people who are physically challenged? And fat.

OK, there’d probably be a lot of goals and objectives not met. And no, I couldn’t justify even the ones that a program based on fun does meet. But how could we not want to have that even fat people would want to be part of?

Which leads us to why, as in “Why isn’t it this way already?” Why isn’t Physical Education fun? Why isn’t Physical Education all about fun? At least for kids who are not athletes? For kids who need even more desperately to discover the joy that is in their bodies. A joy deeper than Jell-o.

And for the athletic kids, too. What made Physical Education have to be anything other than fun? And what keeps it that way?

Could it have anything to do with how most Physical Education programs have to fight for their very existence, and have been, actually, ever since they were first instituted in public education? Could that be why they stopped being fun? Out of defensiveness?

Unfortunately, even with all our research and reasons, it just keeps getting worse. Today, gym classes are getting shorter and shorter, and in many curricula, vanishing all together. And playgrounds are actually filled over with portable classrooms. There’s no room to play, and there’s no time for recess.

Just at the time when childhood obesity is becoming a worldwide concern.

So instead of offering the kinds of programs that will attract and serve “the rest of the kids” – the overweight kids who aren’t athletes, and don’t want to be, but who like having fun, even when it means running around a lot – PE teachers are spending their increasingly limited means fighting for the very survival of any programs.
And it’s been that way now for how many years?

For far too many PE teachers, the only thing that has changed is that it has gotten worse. Less time. Less appreciation. Less fun.

So I’m thinking maybe we should start working on a backup plan, just in case. And as long as we’re planning, we might as well plan to do something fun.

After all, isn’t that really what brought most of us into Physical Education in the first place? The fun we had found using our bodies. The fun we wanted to share.

How about this? How about, if there’s no room for play and no time for class, we get PE teachers paid to go out into neighborhood and organize pick-up games? In parking lots, if they have to. And the courtyard in the senior center. And after-hours at the hospital cafeteria. With anybody that happens to want to play.

Or paying PE teachers to be neighborhood personal coaches, so they can help families find things they to do that are fun and physical together, and in the mean time coach whole families back into health.

And maybe someday they’ll even pay PE teachers to do that very thing in the schools, during school, after school - for kids, teachers, parents – that very fun thing we are all about and all here for.