Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain

Two nights ago, I gave a presentation at the 2011 IGDA Indianapolis Charity Toy Drive, a great event that I hope becomes an annual tradition. My presentation was entitled Fun, Learning, Games, and Responsible Design (in under 20 minutes). I gave an overview about the relationship between games and learning, and my core message was a rallying cry, asking designers to seriously consider what players learn by playing their games. My perspectives on this are heavily influenced by Raph Koster's work, and as I told the crowd, every designer should read Theory of Fun for Game Design.

I generally don't post slides from my talks because the slides don't stand alone: you could not reconstruct the message by only looking at the slides. I agree with Martin Fowler, that "slideuments" are flawed by definition. However, there was one slide from my talk that really seemed to resonate with the crowd. I based much of my presentation on applications of Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain toward gameplay experiences. Wikipedia has a nice, simple diagram that presents the taxonomy, and I have used this in presentations and handouts before---but this was always when using OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice directly. For the IGDA presentation, I needed a PDF, and something about the conversion to PDF left the diagram quite jaggy. To solve my problem, I made my own variant on the public domain image within LibreOffice, and it looks a little something like this:

This variation is CC-BY in case you want to insert it directly into your own presentations, papers, posters, etc. An ODG version is available as well. Full license terms below.

Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain by Paul Gestwicki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at en.wikipedia.org.