\"Activities are just games\" — and other myths that keep the lecture on life support

There's a prejudice that runs quietly through a lot of higher education, and it goes something like this: lectures and exams are serious, and everything else (activities, group work, simulations, anything that gets students doing rather than listening) is a bit soft. Fine for schools. Fine for a light week before the holidays. But not the real work of a university, where rigor apparently means a room full of people taking notes in silence.

Say it that baldly and most of us would object. But the prejudice rarely shows up as an argument. It shows up as a reflex — a slight reluctance to build a course around activities, a worry that a colleague or an external examiner will see "active learning" and read "not demanding." So we default back to the lecture, not because we've judged it superior, but because it feels more serious. That feeling deserves a closer look, because it's doing a lot of damage on very little evidence.

Engagement is not the opposite of rigor

The myth quietly assumes that if students are engaged — talking, building, deciding, competing — they can't also be doing hard intellectual work. That enjoyment and difficulty are opposites. But think about your own field. The moments you grew most weren't the lectures you sat through; they were the times you had to use something: argue a position, solve a real problem, defend a design, make a call with incomplete information. Those moments were engaging because they were demanding, not instead of it.

A good activity isn't a break from the rigor. It's where the rigor actually gets exercised. A structured debate forces students to evaluate evidence under pressure. A simulation makes them apply judgement, not just recall it. A case analysis asks them to synthesise, weigh, and decide. These are the higher-order verbs — analyse, evaluate, create — that sit at the top of every outcomes framework and that a silent lecture, however brilliant, simply cannot assess. Engagement isn't the enemy of rigor. Quite often it's the only thing that reaches the parts of rigor a lecture can't.

"Game" is doing a lot of unfair work in that sentence

The word "game" gets used as an insult here, and it's worth pausing on why. A game, in the dismissive sense, means something with no stakes — pleasant, pointless, disconnected from any real outcome. And yes: a poorly designed activity can be exactly that. We've all seen the group task that generates energy and no learning, the gimmick that entertains and assesses nothing. That's a real failure mode, and it's fair to guard against it.

But the failure isn't "activity." The failure is design. An activity that isn't anchored to a clear outcome, pitched at the right level, and marked against real criteria will feel like a game — because functionally it is one. The same is true, incidentally, of a lecture that isn't anchored to anything: nobody calls a rambling, aimless lecture "a game," but it's just as empty. We hold activities to a standard of purpose we mysteriously don't always demand of the format we inherited. The fix isn't to avoid activities. It's to design them with the same seriousness we'd want for any assessment: tied to outcomes, level-appropriate, defensible.

Why the lecture default persists anyway

If the evidence for active learning is so strong, why does the lecture-and-exam default survive? Part of it is culture — it's what was done to us, so it feels like what rigor looks like. But a big part is far more practical, and far more honest: a good activity is harder to build than a lecture is to deliver.

You can give a competent lecture on a topic you know well with relatively little new preparation. Designing an activity that's genuinely rigorous — anchored to your outcomes, pitched right, with criteria that hold up — is hours of work, every time. So when the term gets tight, the lecture wins. Not because anyone decided it teaches better, but because it's cheaper to produce under pressure. The "activities aren't serious" myth is partly a story we tell to justify a choice that time, not pedagogy, made for us.

That's worth naming plainly, because it changes what the real obstacle is. For a lot of faculty, the barrier to running more — and more rigorous — activities was never a belief that they don't work. It's that building good ones costs hours nobody has. Remove that cost and the myth loses its last practical excuse.

Take activities as seriously as you take the lecture

None of this is an argument against lectures. It's an argument against the unexamined ranking that puts the lecture at the top and everything else below it by default. The honest position is simpler: the format should be chosen by the outcome, not by which one feels more academic or which one is easier to prepare. Sometimes that's a lecture. Often it's an activity that makes students do the very thing your outcomes say they should be able to do.

When you stop treating activities as the soft option and start designing them with real intent, they become the most rigorous teaching in your course — the place where students don't just hear the discipline, they practise it.

That's the work Quindaria is built to make affordable. Give it your course — your outcomes, your topics, your level — and it builds activities, projects and assessments that are designed to be rigorous, not playful: tied to your outcomes, pitched at your level, and yours to refine. Serious teaching, without the hours that used to make "serious" and "active" feel like a choice.

Your course. Your style. Always aligned.

Pick the outcome a lecture has never quite managed to assess — and build the activity that finally does. Sign up for free →