The Solution

The answer is clear: it's no fun!

To state that “we learn better when we’re having fun” is to state the obvious. We know from our own personal lives that, for example, the experience of learning how to play Super Smash Bros. and the experience of learning how to use the sin() function are very different. We know which types of experiences we liked more, and which engaged us more. Most importantly, we kn2ow which experiences inspired us, leading us to do even more learning on our own. After school, there was homework, which meant we had to learn about past participles, historical dates and trigonometric functions. And then, after homework, we got to learn about Monopoly, Pokemon, football and Call of Duty.

Unsurprisingly, experiments and data support the same conclusion. Playing Super Mario 64 builds hippocampal grey matter (source). Playing Super Monkey Ball helps doctors perform laparoscopic surgery (source). Bleeding edge machine learning algorithms are being written by college students to win Pokemon battles (source). Why would anyone learn ML just to play Pokemon? Because Pokemon is fun. It only takes one drop of fun to inspire a sea of learning.