Hi folks!
John here—and let me tell you, these days my life feels like it’s set on “expert” mode. As a brand-new dad (surprise!), my schedule is totally upside down. Most nights are a blur of late-night feedings, diaper changes, and trying to squeeze in micro-naps wherever I can. But when I’m not writing, researching, or designing resources for EMC² Learning, you’ll find me keeping myself awake during the wee hours by firing up old-school video games on my Nintendo Switch.
And not just any games. Oh no sir. I’m talking about a hit parade of absolute classics all the way from the vaunted kingdom of Hyrule. Specifically, I’ve been kicking the proverbial tires of The Legend of Zelda (NES, 1986), The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES, 1991), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo 64, 1998), The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (Nintendo 64, 2000), The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii 2011), and—of course— The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo Switch, 2017), and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Nintendo Switch, 2023). The Switch is perfect for these little bursts of gameplay between rocking my daughter to sleep, thanks to its plug-and-play portability and ability to save progress mid-adventure.
But here’s what surprised me: what started as a bit of nostalgia-fueled fun quickly turned into a deep dive into brilliant design thinking—and it’s packed with takeaways we can apply to our classrooms today.
In fact, this isn’t a new revelation for me and Michael. In our 2021 book Fully Engaged, we dedicated an entire section to exploring the magic of Zelda’s game design. Let’s set the scene real quick:
In Fully Engaged, we turned back the clocks and compared two famous explorers from early video game history: Pitfall Harry (from Atari’s Pitfall, 1982) and Link (from The Legend of Zelda, 1986).
Both were wildly successful in their time. Pitfall Harry guided players through a straightforward jungle maze, dodging scorpions and grabbing treasures in under 20 minutes. It sold 4 million copies—a huge hit. But Pitfall didn’t last. It fizzled out, and while you might find a dusty sequel in a bargain bin somewhere, it’s no longer part of the gaming zeitgeist.
Now let’s look at Zelda. Released just four years later, it was every bit as simple on paper: 8-bit graphics, easy-to-learn controls. Yet The Legend of Zelda launched a multigenerational juggernaut, spawning over two dozen sequels and still going strong today. As a frame of reference, Nintendo Switch’s Breath of the Wild, has sold more than 20 million copies (and counting).
So what’s the secret?
Depth. Zelda’s designers created a world that rewards exploration, curiosity, and critical thinking. Players don’t just dodge obstacles—they have conversations, solve mysteries, unlock hidden items, and embark on epic quests. And despite all the upgrades over the years, one thing hasn’t changed: Link himself barely says a word.
That silence is by design. Link is meant to be us—the literal “link” between the game world and the player’s imagination. His quest is massive, but we step into his shoes, discovering new skills and rising to challenges as if they’re our own.
As Dr. James Paul Gee writes in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy:
“So here we have something that is long, hard, and challenging. However, you cannot play a game if you cannot learn it. If no one plays a game, it does not sell, and the company that makes it goes broke. Of course, designers could keep making the games shorter and simpler to facilitate learning. That’s often what schools do. But no, in this case, game designers keep making the games longer and more challenging (and introduce new things in new ones) and still manage to get them learned. How? If you think about it, you see a Darwinian sort of thing going on here. If a game, for whatever reason, has good principles of learning built into its design -- that is, if it facilitates learning in good ways -- then it gets played and can sell a lot of copies, if it is otherwise good as well. If a game has poor learning principles built into its design, then it won’t get learned or played and it won’t sell well. In the end, then, video games represent a process, thanks to what Marx calls the ‘creativity of capitalism,’ that leads to better and better designs for good learning and, indeed, good learning of hard and challenging things.”
In other words: games like The Legend of Zelda endure because they’re brilliantly designed to teach hard things well.
Lessons for the Classroom
As I replayed each of these classic games between bottles and burp cloths (and, dear heavens, so, so many diapers), I kept thinking: this is exactly what we want from great teaching.
Here are 10 powerful lessons from Zelda that we can apply to our classrooms:
1. Learning by Discovery
Zelda doesn’t hold your hand. It trusts players to poke around, experiment, and figure things out. So much so that the game’s designers deliberately made certain parts of the game totally inaccessible to novice players: cleverly forcing them to learn by doing, and even talk through their experiences with fellow players on the playgrounds and school busses long after “the game” had been paused. Classrooms that emphasize exploration and inquiry-based learning can spark that same magic.
2. Student Agency
Zelda gives players freedom to tackle objectives in different ways and orders. Travel upwards or down? Attack this rogue batch of enemies or try to avoid detection? Use the boomerang or the bow and arrow? There are literally tens of thousands of possible combinations of play styles that can be rewarded in any one of your adventures through one of Zelda’s multi-hour-long campaigns. The path that you choose is entirely up to you! How often can we say the same in our classrooms? And how might incorporating such thoughtful design elements to our students as choice boards, passion projects, and open-ended pathways help to keep them engaged and motivated?
3. Scaffolding & Challenge
Conquer one dungeon? Great—here’s a tougher one. Zelda scales difficulty as you grow, just like we can scaffold learning to meet students where they are while keeping the bar high. As Doug Lemov writes in his seminal Teach Like a Champion: In the best classrooms, “the reward for the correct answer… will be harder questions.” Learning never stops.
4. Meaningful Choices
Players can collect items, take side quests, or push straight to the boss fight. Meaningful choices deepen buy-in—and authentic learning tasks can do the same in your classroom. This runs in direct contrast to the typical approach to “one size fits all” homework assignments. If a student is already maintaining an “A” average in your class, the only thing that homework can do is bring their grade down. And if a student is failing your class, simply repeating the same mistakes (with no corrective intervention from the teacher) while working through course material at home isn’t likely to improve their performance.
5. Minimal Front-Loading
One of the things I love the most about this game series is that regardless of the particular title, installment, or console you’re playing on, there really is no endless tutorial. In fact, the original Zelda game simply drops you squarely into the world and challenges you to hit the ground running. And even in later installments like Ocarina of Time and Tears of the Kingdom (which come pre-loaded with a bit of a new player tutorial to help them find their footing in a sort of “practice level”), Zelda really does teach players how to succeed through doing. Think of that next time you’re tempted to over-explain; often, well-crafted activities guide students more effectively than a long lecture.
6. Rewarding Curiosity
Burn a random bush, bomb a random wall—and hidden treasures are yours. Zelda delights in difficulty, encourages exploration, and rewards curiosity, and our classrooms should too. In the resources that Michael and I design here for EMC² Learning, we really try to lean into that same space space for “what if?” moments and celebrate surprises… opening doors for the sorts of epic, memorable moments where a student finds themselves on the winning end of an activity after stretching their thinking to the point where they were willing to try something that was “so crazy it just might work.” When students are encouraged to ask questions, explore alternate solutions, and take intellectual risks, they build a deeper and more personal understanding of the content.
7. Immediate Feedback
Heart containers, rupees, power-ups… feedback is instant and visible. Gamified trackers and clear success criteria help students see their progress in real time. And the thoughtful introduction of even the smallest gamified resources or game-inspired course design elements like badges, leaderboards, and power-up cards can really shift the way that students start to visualize just how far they’ve come in the world of our lesson plans. Immediate feedback doesn’t just boost motivation—it supports self-regulation and helps students make meaningful adjustments in the moment.
8. Safe to Fail
Let’s make one thing perfectly clear: You’re going to die. A lot. But Zelda makes it safe—and fun—to keep trying. In fact (minor spoiler), both the original Zelda game and it’s iconic sequel for the Super Nintendo gleefully declare the total number of times you’ve died right there alongside of the final credits and your player select avatar as a friendly reminder of just how gosh darn hard this game actually has been! That’s a beautiful model for classrooms built around growth mindset and resilience. When failure is framed as part of the process, not the end of the road, students are more likely to persevere, reflect, and try again with renewed focus.
9. Layered Learning
Zelda starts simple but gets deceptively deep. Side quests invite extended interactions with non player characters. So-called “fetch quests” stand in for the sort of thing that many teachers might look at as “extra credit” to give the player the ability to level up their skills through various mini games of skill and strategy. And at every turn, the game does a phenomenal job of world-building and storytelling without once ever feeling like you’re being overloaded with a clunky lecture full of shoehorned narrative exposition. Great lessons can do the same—offering simple entry points but layers of richness as students dig deeper. Well-designed activities allow learners to unlock new insights over time, building complexity naturally without overwhelming them at the start.
10. The Journey Is the Reward
Zelda’s quests are memorable because of the journey, not just the win screen. And the moment I finally finished the first quest in The Legend of Zelda to a 100% completion (it only took me, like, 39 years)? The game slyly offered its congratulations, along with the challenge to enter a totally different SECOND QUEST that repurposed everything you thought you knew about the game for an even more challenging, more in-depth experience to engage that much deeper with the maps, characters, and collectible items that you’d become so familiar with over your many hours of gameplay up until that point.
And isn’t that the point in the end?
The best learning sticks with us, long after the unit is done. Every time we re-open The Great Gatsby or pop a new slide of mitochondrial DNA under our electron microscope, we’re welcomed right back into a wide realm of possibilities that challenge us to pick up right back where we left off inside of a world that we come to know more of each time we explore it and ask ourselves “what if?” Designing learning as an experience—not just a checklist—creates powerful memories that anchor content in purpose and meaning.
As a new dad, I’m living on caffeine, catnaps, and… apparently, life lessons from classic video game cartridges that were born nearly 40 years before my daughter. But here’s the big takeaway: whether we’re designing a game or a classroom experience, our goal is the same. Build worlds that empower, challenge, and inspire learners—and let them step into the shoes of the hero.
It’s dangerous to go alone—take this!
The activities featured in this blog post are just a handful of the 900+ resources available and on their way to arrive shortly in the EMC² Learning library. This entire library is available to all members with an active Engagement Engineer or Engagement Engineer PLUS account, and is included with your annual site membership. We hope you’ll consider joining us as an Engagement Engineer to unlock a full year of site access. For complete details including our exclusive limited time offer for annual site membership, click here.
