According to Mr. Howard-Jones, students learn more, and are happier to continue learning, when they are offered the chance of a reward rather than a guaranteed reward. Instead of trying to ban portable phones or portable computers from the classroom, teachers should be trying to harness the power of games in their lessons. “We call it TWIG — teaching with immersive gaming,” he said, explaining that “I teach several of my postgraduate courses in educational neuroscience using this medium.”

The call to bring not just the computer, but computer games, into the lecture room was one of the few areas of agreement in a conference that featured speakers whose political views ranged from Noam Chomsky, the linguist and leftist political activist, to Ed Vaizey, a Conservative cabinet minister, and whose career paths included a round-the-world sailor, Ellen MacArthur, the inventor Ray Kurzweil, the businessman Conrad Wolfram and the virtual reality pioneer (and cyberdissident) Jaron Lanier.

Tucked into a small fraction of London’s cavernous Olympia convention hall — whose other temporary tenants, fittingly enough, were an exhibition on learning technologies and the 2012 London Toy Fair — the 650 delegates to Learning Without Frontiers found themselves in an event that felt like a mashup of a music festival, a political convention, and freshman orientation at a college campus on a slightly more advanced planet. Instead of mundane exhibitors’ stands, delegates made their way through a forest of bright white inflatable domes — including one devoted entirely to the joys of Lego. Just to complete the picture of geek heaven, on entry each delegate was given a new iPad — included as part of the two-day conference’s £995, or about $1,500, registration fee.

These were people who could feel Ray Kurzweil’s pain when he said, referring to Wikipedia’s recent 24-hour blackout to protest pending U.S. anti-piracy legislation: “When Wikipedia went down I felt like a part of my brain went on strike.” And when he told the group “the era when we could just spoon-feed facts to kids is over,” and exhorted the teachers and parents in the room to “let your children take their iPads into school,” they looked up from their own iPads to nod (or Tweet) their approval.

Mr. Kurzweil, a polymath who in 1976 invented the Kuzweil Reading Machine, which allowed computers to read printed text aloud to blind people, and also worked with one of his early customers, the musician Stevie Wonder, to develop the Kurzweil K250 music synthesizer, is well-known for his bold predictions. In his presentation he reviewed recent advances in 3-D printing technology, which uses digital files to create three dimensional objects and then said “in 10 years we’ll be able to ship a 3-D printer to Nigeria, which they can use to print out another one. Then they can use those two to print out two more, and then eight and so on. And they can then use those machines to print out most of the things you need for modern life, from housing to solar panels to pipes for carrying clean water.”