Once players acquire the portal gun, they begin to take a more active role in the learning process. Now they must experiment in order to achieve success. As shown below, players must closely scrutinize the environment, make hypotheses about their actions, and interpret their results in a meaningful way.
Ultimately, Valve wants player to learn certain skills and form “correct” associations between given design elements. However, this learning is couched in strong context, given a projective lens, and delivered via active experimentation. Portal is structured such that predefined curriculum is disguised as personal discovery.
