Posted: April 4th, 2013 | Author: Cassandra Xia | Filed under: Assignment 7 | No Comments »
I was inspired by the Klopfer and Sheldon paper in which the authors transitioned students from playing a game about environmentalism to authoring their own environmentalism game. The act of having students develop their own game was valuable both for content creation specific to the students’ geographical location and as a learning process. I really admired this approach for its pragmatic value– fewer resources are required because students can be relied upon to generate content as part of the learning process!
This was the first time I have thought of user-based content generation from the context of learning, and I am excited about the scalability of the idea. In addition, to requiring fewer “expert” users and “teachers, I think that the idea may be powerful from a motivational perspective. Requiring users to generate content that will be used by other users, may motivate them to yield higher quality content. Beyond the environmentalism game example, I think the technique could be used more generally in the form of teaching. I frequently hear TAs or professors say that you really learn material when you have to teach it. What if we could apply the same concept to regular students? Imagine a student is learning a subject and given questions probing their understanding of the material in the traditional manner. Imagine that the student is told that with some X% probability, their answer will be given to another student learning the same material when the other student is stuck and, in keeping with the quiz show “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire”, phones a friend for help. In this scenario, the student may be motivated to learn the material more carefully for the sake of potentially helping a classmate down the road. The student may be more motivated in this group learning scenario than individualized learning. Humans are social beings after all, and user-based content generation during learning may be useful for more than content creation.
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