About
As an extension of Jenova Chen's Flow in Games thesis, Active Quiz is a demonstration of how the passive and negative experience of a traditional quiz can be vastly improved and turns into a rather positive and active activity by using interactive design and positive psychology, which are well known to today's video game design community.
Notice this is not a video game. It is not designed to draw you in for hours like flOw. This is a statement to raise awareness of the use of games in education. It is time for the education community to use video game design to improve techniques in education. More specifically, to help students enjoy taking test.
Why Bother?
"Today, an entire generation has grown up with video games. This generation learns their world through constant cycles of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis. It is a fundamentally different take on problem solving than the linear, read-the-manual-first approach of their parents. In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture." - [Will Wright 2006]
Grown up with video games, I am honored to be part of the generation Mr. Wright mentioned above. However, video games have been seen by many parents as addicting and even dangerous simply because most kids spend more time playing video games than their study. I am one of them.
Is this video games’ fault?
Are video games too addicting so that kids can’t focus on their studies anymore?
The answer is negative. Even if video games did not exist, our kids will still be distracted by many other media, TVs, anime, comics, novels, playgrounds and toys, the physical form of most video games. In fact, as we all have experienced, we learned quite a lot from these “entertainments”. Rather than complaining about how video games are destroying our children’s GPA, it is time to question our long trusted education systems.
During the last twenty years, the games our children played and the media they consumed have evolved through quantum leaps. The quality of today's video game experiences are hundreds and thousands times richer than what they were 20 years ago. However, look at our fundamental science courses, and the standardized quizzes and exams. How much have they changed?
Therefore, I picked one of the simplest examples in our education structure, elementary school math quiz, to demonstrate how dated our education method is and what could be improved from both game design and positive psychology perspective.
What's wrong with Quiz?
You may have seen students become addicted to certain classes and projects in the school, but you rarely see anyone like taking quizzes. For hundreds of years, quizzes and exams have been used as tools to measure students’ skills in the related subject. As a result, quizzes offer positive feedbacks to the students and help them to adjust their study habits. And potentially, the students will feel fun in their studies.
However, the process of a quiz is not interests provoking at all. The negative emotion generated from quizzes and bad scores usually become the direct killer of a student’s interests towards the subject. And below are some of the key design flaws of the existing quiz structure.
- No positive feedback at all
- Where is the sense of control?
- Passive experience VS active experience
To be continued... |
