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This is dumb. You're going to end up with students who are great at farmville and terrible at anything remotely difficult. In other words, he is rewarding task

by naner 17y ago

This is dumb. You're going to end up with students who are great at farmville and terrible at anything remotely difficult. In other words, he is rewarding task completion and ignoring self-motivation, discipline, creativity, etc. I've seen this same theme repeated many times. "Foods engineered to be addictively tasty" or "Reality TV engineered to hook viewers", etc. You are manipulating people to obtain a specific result (sell more food cheaply, get more viewers, get higher grades), but not necessarily the one that would be most beneficial to the individual (healthy food, rewarding storytelling, mature adults capable of tackling complex problems).

psyklic 17y ago
It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be equivalent. The big question for me though is exactly as you point out. Engineering projects, for example, are really only valuable if they work. And it's hard to measure the progress in-between non-working and working if you don't observe the team carefully, except of course by "time spent." No matter which system is used for grading, it won't be perfect -- it will cater toward some students and not toward others. Since most students are only exposed to one dominant way, I am all for experiments such as this.
- naner 17y ago
  > It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be equivalent. This is absolutely true. That is why people always claim you only get out what you put into schooling. You have to do more than just make the grade. This article makes it sound like he really wants to ramp things up, though. And I believe he's approaching it the wrong way.
bd 17y ago
Well, considering this is a game design class, it's actually quite clever. Also, details do matter: instead of Farmville it could be more like Dungeons & Dragons where professor is your dungeon master.
thwarted 17y ago
It would be interesting to have it based on awards/achievements, rather than experience points as experience points are just a renaming of the grade number that maps to a letter. At the beginning of the class, there is a huge number of projects or tasks, and they are combined in different ways to "unlock" achievements. Actual grades could be based on how many of different difficulties you have at the end of the class. You can't unlock more difficult achievements without unlocking other ones first (or in tandem). Students get to choose exactly which path they want to take through the assignments to get the right kind/enough achievements to pass. Consider a compiler design class, where the tasks are things like "implement a RPN calculator", "write an LALR parser", "parser that acknowledges operator precedence", "code generator for a CISC machine", "code generator for a RISC machine", "implement space-saving optimizations", "implement time-saving optimizations", "execute code by walking the AST", "generate intermediate bytecode", "parser generator using Yacc/Bison", "parser generator using lemon". These are kind of high level, they'd need to be somewhat more discrete in the ramp-up phase at the start of the class.
- barrkel 17y ago
  I don't think XP is a simple mapping to grade numbers - see my comment elsewhere in this post. Doing less than perfectly in any single test hurts your potential grade permanently, but not necessarily so with XP.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    I'm not saying it necessarily is a simple mapping, but I think it's easier for people to misunderstand the relationship since both are effectively "point based". Can an XP based system be any different than those teachers who say upfront that each quiz or test or question or whathaveyou is worth X number of points? If you need a certain number of XP to pass the class, and you don't gain enough at a critical juncture in the course, do you get a chance to make it up? Doing away with the time component of class based instruction, where exams are administered at given, set times, and you just need to prove that you know the material come the last day of class, would be an XP based system. I've had teachers do that before. Really, expecting students to make specific progress at a specific rate over the semester, as codified in regular exams, is a way to avoid having to deal with teaching different things at different times to a group of students, in the name of efficiency.
derefr 17y ago
It's important to point out that there are still certain standards you have to adhere to in order to earn the achievements/XP. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if, in order to gain the experience for completing an assignment, you actually have to complete it to a 100% rating (which, of course, makes sense in programming assignments, but not as much in English papers.) No bugs, no errors, no unclear thinking—you have to demonstrate, through that assignment and that assignment alone, that you understand every line and every word that went into its construction, and all the topics it covered. There are many students who scrape by with a 60-70% grade in classes—this means that, after completing the course, there may be 40% of its content that they have no idea about, yet still managed to pass, and therefore are considered to know for having "completed" the course. This would be impossible an experience-based system—you'd do each assignment, over and over, until you got it right, and then you'd be done that topic. You wouldn't have to later do a test, or an assignment covering the same topics, because you had already proven you were capable of doing everything required. It's almost as if right now we're passing or failing kids using fuzzy logic like a spam filter, when there's a simple set of discrete rules (for some subjects) that would give correct judgements 100% of the time, instead of 80%.
barrkel 17y ago
Not all manipulation is evil - on the contrary, all sorts of everyday manipulation is entirely benign and positive in nature. See e.g. http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235 http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235

by naner 17y ago

psyklic 17y ago

It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be equivalent. The big question for me though is exactly as you point out. Engineering projects, for example, are really only valuable if they work. And it's hard to measure the progress in-between non-working and working if you don't observe the team carefully, except of course by "time spent." No matter which system is used for grading, it won't be perfect -- it will cater toward some students and not toward others. Since most students are only exposed to one dominant way, I am all for experiments such as this.

naner 17y ago
> It all depends on how it is implemented. After all, you could take regular grades and assign points to each grade -- and the two systems would be equivalent. This is absolutely true. That is why people always claim you only get out what you put into schooling. You have to do more than just make the grade. This article makes it sound like he really wants to ramp things up, though. And I believe he's approaching it the wrong way.

bd 17y ago

Well, considering this is a game design class, it's actually quite clever. Also, details do matter: instead of Farmville it could be more like Dungeons & Dragons where professor is your dungeon master.

thwarted 17y ago

It would be interesting to have it based on awards/achievements, rather than experience points as experience points are just a renaming of the grade number that maps to a letter. At the beginning of the class, there is a huge number of projects or tasks, and they are combined in different ways to "unlock" achievements. Actual grades could be based on how many of different difficulties you have at the end of the class. You can't unlock more difficult achievements without unlocking other ones first (or in tandem). Students get to choose exactly which path they want to take through the assignments to get the right kind/enough achievements to pass. Consider a compiler design class, where the tasks are things like "implement a RPN calculator", "write an LALR parser", "parser that acknowledges operator precedence", "code generator for a CISC machine", "code generator for a RISC machine", "implement space-saving optimizations", "implement time-saving optimizations", "execute code by walking the AST", "generate intermediate bytecode", "parser generator using Yacc/Bison", "parser generator using lemon". These are kind of high level, they'd need to be somewhat more discrete in the ramp-up phase at the start of the class.

barrkel 17y ago
I don't think XP is a simple mapping to grade numbers - see my comment elsewhere in this post. Doing less than perfectly in any single test hurts your potential grade permanently, but not necessarily so with XP.
- thwarted 17y ago
  I'm not saying it necessarily is a simple mapping, but I think it's easier for people to misunderstand the relationship since both are effectively "point based". Can an XP based system be any different than those teachers who say upfront that each quiz or test or question or whathaveyou is worth X number of points? If you need a certain number of XP to pass the class, and you don't gain enough at a critical juncture in the course, do you get a chance to make it up? Doing away with the time component of class based instruction, where exams are administered at given, set times, and you just need to prove that you know the material come the last day of class, would be an XP based system. I've had teachers do that before. Really, expecting students to make specific progress at a specific rate over the semester, as codified in regular exams, is a way to avoid having to deal with teaching different things at different times to a group of students, in the name of efficiency.

derefr 17y ago

It's important to point out that there are still certain standards you have to adhere to in order to earn the achievements/XP. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if, in order to gain the experience for completing an assignment, you actually have to complete it to a 100% rating (which, of course, makes sense in programming assignments, but not as much in English papers.) No bugs, no errors, no unclear thinking—you have to demonstrate, through that assignment and that assignment alone, that you understand every line and every word that went into its construction, and all the topics it covered. There are many students who scrape by with a 60-70% grade in classes—this means that, after completing the course, there may be 40% of its content that they have no idea about, yet still managed to pass, and therefore are considered to know for having "completed" the course. This would be impossible an experience-based system—you'd do each assignment, over and over, until you got it right, and then you'd be done that topic. You wouldn't have to later do a test, or an assignment covering the same topics, because you had already proven you were capable of doing everything required. It's almost as if right now we're passing or failing kids using fuzzy logic like a spam filter, when there's a simple set of discrete rules (for some subjects) that would give correct judgements 100% of the time, instead of 80%.

barrkel 17y ago

Not all manipulation is evil - on the contrary, all sorts of everyday manipulation is entirely benign and positive in nature. See e.g. http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235 http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235