I have a confession to make, I love Mark Rober! I mean, what's not to like about the guy? He's smart, funny and seems to have the YouTube algorithm in his back pocket. My kids love him too! Their favorite videos are the backyard squirrel mazes. We are currently building our own squirrel obstacle course in our yard and my son really wants to sign up for Mark's online engineering course. I've promised him we will sign up next summer. Hold us a spot Mark, looks like the class fills up fast!
Mark's video that inspired me to make some major changes to my teaching was a TEDx called "The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More" in which Mark described an experiment he ran on his YouTube channel. 50,000 viewers who participated in a coding challenge were randomly placed into two groups. Users started with 200 points and were randomly placed into two groups that would receive different types of feedback after attempting to run the code they had written to move a car through a virtual maze.
In one experimental group, a user who attempted to run code that did not work would see the message "That didn't work. Please try again." These users were not penalized points. Users in the other group would see the following message if their code did not work. "That didn't work. You lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again." It was really the data from Mark's experiment that got me thinking. The users who were penalized points had a 52% success rate compared to a 68% success rate for users who were not penalized. Also very interesting was the fact that participants who received penalties averaged 5 attempts before writing successful code, while the group that was not penalized on average made 12 attempts before succeeding. The logical conclusion from the data was that participants who were not penalized for making a mistake were much more likely to keep trying until they were successful. I'm not a bad science teacher; I like to think that I usually do a pretty good job. But along the way, I could have done a better job for some of my students. Mark's video showed that his viewers were more likely to keep trying until they succeeded if they were not penalized for making mistakes. If want to do everything in my power to encourage my students to keep trying and to help them be successful, why wouldn't I make my classroom pratices more like the experiment when participants received positive encouragement without penalties? This realization has inspired me to change how I teach and grade my students. I've decided to use gamification and ungrading to make my students' experiences be more like unpenalized group in Mark's experiment. In future posts I'll share my plans for how I will change my teaching style. My next post will share the class trailer video and storyline ideas for the universe our gamified science class will exist in.
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Noel PaullerThank for visiting my blog where I post thoughts from the random corner of the universe which is my brain. Archives
October 2022
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