I recently remembered a tennis course I was taking when I was a teenager which often had a constructivist approach. The coach was usually setting up an exercise where he asked us to perform a certain motion to hit the ball toward a certain place. Someday it was a backhand, another a volley etc.  One motion and one objective, the task was not too demanding. Once we understood what was expected, the coach would throw balls at us and we were free to experiment, free to find how it would work for us, constructing a new backhand. At certain points some of us would show signs of frustration, sometimes the coach shared what he thought was wrong and sometimes other learners gave their own advice.

To me, this is a vivid example of scaffolding at play :

• The exercise is focused.

• Thus, learner can approach it autonomously (discovery learning).

• Feedback is timely and personalized (ZPD).

• Learners are able to share their discoveries (social constructivism).

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Recently we can see some of these principles applied to games. Now it is not rare to have systems checking constantly if a player is stuck somewhere, or, if he constantly repeats the same mistakes. In this cases, but only then, it shows complementary informations or tutorials, relevant to his or her context.

Moreover games compartementalize learning, game mechanics are often taught one by one and so are new elements, especially at the beginning. The concepts of ZPD and Flow share many characteristics, in some sense, as the second is making it's way into the game industry so is the first.

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