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I’ve been thinking about attention because I’m teaching Excel, which is not the most interesting topic. To make it more engaging, I’ve set the Business Tools class up around Space Tours, a fictional space-tourism company in a retro-future universe. It’s 2067 as imagined in 1967, Mad Men meets the Moon landing. But the problems are the kind you’d have to solve for a real company in 2026.

In theory, this means more work for me, not less. I have to create and then teach the students the lore of Space Tours, alongside how to work with spreadsheets. Every second I spend on space stuff is time I’m not teaching them formulas. 

Yet they play along with this split universe. When I leave as Space Tours CEO “Christophé” and come back as their tutor, they tell me: “You just missed him. The CEO was here!” They also learn Excel much better than when I’ve taught it any other way. If I’m taking less time with Excel but getting improved results, something must be happening.

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• Touch is a simple and effective way to manage learners’ cognitive load
• Using communication before content to develop cognitive presence

Cognitive load theory (CLT) divides the mental workload of a task into three types: intrinsic (the load of the task itself), extraneous (the load of the environment and how the task is communicated – font, accent, noise) and germane (the work of managing your mental resources). For example, try remembering the number sequence 4119891199315941. It’s difficult. But rearrange the same digits into 1914191819391945, and it’s easy. Instead of 16 digits, you’re handling four dates or two wars or one idea: dates of the world wars. The things you can hold are concepts, not bits of data, and the part of you that noticed the dates and chunked 16 down to four was germane load.

Most CLT teaching advice tells you to reduce extraneous load, leaving more brain power for the student to work out how to solve the problem (germane) and solve it (intrinsic). But I think extraneous load isn’t the villain it’s made out to be, and the reason is attention. A student has only so much attention for the class, and it is split across the three loads. The catch is that it’s far easier to pay attention to things with lots of extraneous load.

In a previous class, we worked out which space route made the most profit; students compared Venus Voyage, Mars Express and so on. I could have put the sheet on a screen, pointed at the sale price and cost columns, and started teaching. That keeps extraneous load low. The students begin exactly where they need to be, but it’s dull, so anything else in the room pulls them away: phones buzzing, the smell of a deskmate’s crisps, the temperature. At the start of a class, before anyone is paying attention to anything, all the load is extraneous. Strip it out of my material and I’m just handing that capacity to the environment.

So I do the opposite. I push the lesson’s salience to maximum. I use costumes, characters, accents, a whole retro-futurist universe to tie environment to the content. I make a land grab for as much attention as I can, then redirect it once they start on the problem. 

First, the CEO visits (that’s me in a waistcoat and moustache with a pan-European accent), boasting about his huge investment in a new space liner and the route he wants to run it on. Posters advertise planetary destinations, orbital diagrams cover the whiteboard, 1960s space jazz plays. It has nothing to do with Excel, but the storytelling pulls them into the universe and grabs their attention.

Then the head of sales arrives (me again, this time with collar up and hair slicked back) to explain the sales data. Same story, so the attention comes with him, but now they start transferring some of it to germane load, enjoying the show while spotting which parts of the data matter, building the chunks they’ll need. Then the plain tutor returns. No costume, no accent. I curse that I missed the visitors and ask what they wanted. Getting them to tell me the task converts the attention I captured into germane load, and then I show them how to solve it in Excel, in quiet chunks, intrinsic load at last.

But attention spent on intrinsic load has a half-life. It decays back into extraneous load at a rate that depends on the room (heat, hunger, noise). So, the method captures attention on extraneous load, then drops the theatrics so bandwidth can be spent on germane and intrinsic load, and races to finish before it collapses. When it runs low, the CEO or head of sales comes back for a “progress report”. Not to help solve the problem, but to re-capture the attention and redirect it again.

Once you see attention as something you capture and redirect, you can see why you end up saying: “Come on, let’s concentrate.” That’s the attention on intrinsic load breaking down, reverting to extraneous load and being absorbed by the environment. You have two options: make the environment non-porous (no devices, perfect heating, silence) or accept that attention will leak and design your class to re-capture and redirect it whenever it runs low.

Chris Jones is an automation (AI) consultant/programmer and lecturer at Regent’s University London, the University of Kent and ICAEW (the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales). 

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