Super Mario Maker 2

Trust, Pedagogy and Play

A 9-week study of two Grade 7 classrooms in British Columbia, in which students played Nintendo Switch games (WarioWare: Get it Together and Super Mario Maker 2) for 15 minutes a day, forms the empirical basis for an argument that trust is an overlooked precondition for both play and learning.

• The authors argue trust is an overlooked precondition for learning: learning involves risk and destabilization of existing understanding, so students must trust teachers (epistemic trust) and the game itself (ludic trust) to engage with it.
• Students enjoyed the games and trusted their technical reliability, yet classroom power structures, teacher uncertainty about videogames, limited time, reduced task demands, and teachers not playing alongside students all constrained educational value.
• Converting game experiences into conventional written tasks effectively 'cancels out' what games uniquely offer, so game-based pedagogy requires media-appropriate design and substantial teacher investment rather than simply inserting games into existing routines.