"Naches"

Naches is a Yiddish word that means "pride" or "joy." Typically naches refers to the pride or joy that a child brings a parent. For instance, when a child is born people will often say to the new parents "May [your son or daughter] bring you naches." The "ch" is pronounced gutturally - so it's not "ch" as in "cheese" but rather "ch" as in "Bach" (the composer).
http://judaism.about.com/od/glossary/g/Definition-Of-Naches-Yiddish.htm

Teachers obviously get naches from their students, but wouldn't it be cool if we could engineer situations where students get naches form each other?

Now, the idea of pairing a strong student with a weak one is as old as the hills, but usually that system makes the weak student feel ashamed and resentful and the strong one bored and resentful.  Why don't the strong students get naches from watching the weak learn?

My guess is the original task wasn't challenging enough. 

The task has to be difficult enough that the strong student had to work hard to solve it.  Then when the weaker one has a go, the strong one realises that the other student isn't stupid, he's finding it just as difficult.

At the same time, the task has to be fun and stimulating enough so there's a sense of pride in having solved the problem.   That's the tricky part.  I remember math problems at school being difficult, but I didn't feel a whole lot of pride in solving them, more like "thank God that's over!"

A "lusory" attitude is having a sense of play.  That's what makes the difference between a challenge and a difficult task.  So the question becomes, how can we inject a sense of play into our classroom activities? 

I don't know yet, but I've just bought a book called "Theory of fun for game design" by Raph Koster, so maybe he'll know...