| Chieh on Education / Rewards and Education Giving kids the initial motivation to embark upon a project is only the beginning. There are still many more obstacles to overcome before the kids finish their projects. Our next goal is to train the kids to have confidence in themselves. During my research, I observed that there is a high correlation between motivation and confidence. Without confidence, even highly motivated students give up at the first obstacle. So building confidence is the key for our kids to sustain continual motivation. We need kids to tell themselves subconsciously that they can do it. Let's take a closer look at how Blizzard builds confidence among their users. When new players first enter that world, they are immediately given a task to get them started. The initial quests are always designed so that they are easy and quick. By doing this, Blizzard kicks off the user experience with three messages. First, Blizzard is telling users that this won't be a big time commitment. When a person is starting something new, there's always a hesitance about the required time commitment versus its worth. To ease a person's transition, it helps to convince the user that it won't take up too much time. Although no one who has ever played WOW would ever claim it lacks a time commitment, it doesn't matter. The user's initial experience subconsciously gives him the impression of a quick turnaround. People are more willing to experience something quickly because the investment is low. Even if they don't enjoy it, it only lasts a couple of minutes. Second, Blizzard is telling users that it will be easy. While the first message was related to time effort, the second one is about mental effort. The idea is the same in that they do not want to scare away the users by overwhelming them with too much time commitment or mental capacity. They definitely do not want to give the users the impression that WOW is too hard for them, or that they are not intelligent enough to overcome the challenges. The rate at which Blizzard controls the project difficulty is the key to their ability to create confidence among users. People gain confidence quite simply by the act of achieving. When a person has experienced enough achievement in a particular field, he or she automatically feels confident in his or her ability to achieve more. I want to mention that confidence is nothing but a state of mind. Users don't actually have to achieve anything significant. As long as users notice a difference in themselves, they feel like they have achieved something. The way that Blizzard helps users notice that difference is by flooding their initial experiences with quick accomplishments. They first tell you to go hunt some wolves, and then they tell you to go investigate a mine. Neither of which is very hard, but they will be sure to convince you how good a job you have done and give you some gold for it. A couple of minutes ago, you had nothing, but now you have some gold to buy a nice pair of shoes in the game. Blizzard has designed their levels in an exponentially incremental fashion. This means that the beginning stages are always filled with constant positive reinforcement. The pace in the beginning is so slow and success is always guaranteed. Although the pace of this beginning phase might be slow, it is a crucial stage to get users in the habit of gaining achievements and accomplishing projects. Once users are accustomed to seeing themselves being successful, the exponential curve moves up to make each advancement more and more difficult. But by then users are so accustomed to achieving that their confidence level is able to overcome the newer challenges. As the users accomplish more and more difficult challenges, those accomplishments become even further confirmation of their own abilities. By sustaining self-confidence, motivation is automatically retained. There is one caveat that must be addressed. Since confidence is a state of mind, this strategy works the best when users are separated from each other. It is human nature to feel “less” special when everybody else can also accomplish the same task. However, since this might be difficult to implement in our schools, teachers should take note of this fact. The third message Blizzard tells users is to feel comfortable progressing at your own rate. This is one of the most important factors that we can use in education to help kids not to give up. People learn at different speeds and need to spend various amounts of time before moving on. This is not necessarily due to greater or lesser intelligence. There are simply different approaches to learning. Some people prefer to spent more time to build a better foundation before moving on. Other learners might prefer to get only the general idea so they can come back later when the knowledge is needed. Both approaches are valid and would produce desirable results. However, if a learner who takes more time is being taught too fast, that learner would quickly get discouraged because he or she cannot keep up. That same learner would not know that other learners are merely glancing through the topic, but would assume that the other learners are also trying to study in depth. Therefore, the fact that he or she cannot keep up implies that he or she is somehow less intelligent. Although this is a logical conclusion for the learner, it is a dangerous and false belief. On the other hand, if we force a big picture learner to slow down and learn every detail before moving on, we will quickly bore the interest out of that student. That student would not understand why all the details are important because we can simply reference them for when the information is needed later. As you can see, in games or education, having each learner progressing at a rate comfortable to him or her is essential to keeping the individual motivated throughout learning. Yet in our current TOE system, this would be impossible. There are simply not enough teachers to give our students that kind of attention. In a classroom of perhaps thirty students, a teacher can only teach at a single speed and every child has to conform to that speed. Yet, I believe this goal could be met if we are willing to adapt some features of HES. I will go further in depth how to make these changes in the next couple of essays. We can look at how to leverage current technology to improve teacher and school efficiency. We'll also examine how the law of economics affects education. Lessons from the Entertainment Industry These ideas are not rocket science but rather common psychological sense. Confidence and reservation are two feelings we all experience. We want to ease reservation and increase confidence when we are trying to motivate involvement. Yet if we look closely at how we have designed our classes, it becomes obvious that we have neglected these two factors. Let's take the idea of time commitment. Our schools literally ooze with the feeling that learning will monopolize all your time. In fact, our schools project an attitude that it should monopolize all your time whether you like it or not. It makes our students feel that the only way to succeed is to dedicate a huge block of their time. These are not feelings we want to transmit to our students. Quite the contrary, we want the students to feel that it doesn't take up too much time to succeed. The only reason why they might end up spending extra time is because they are achieving something even greater. You see, it doesn't matter if in reality school takes up much time. We just want the kids to feel that it doesn't. Simply by not following this rule, our schools are already down fifteen yards in helping our children. Our schools also don't fare well when it comes to confidence building. Often the syllabus is so jammed with requirements that teachers are forced to fly through materials just to meet the enforced standards. Naturally, teachers end up with kids who can keep up and kids who cannot. The kids who cannot keep up quickly feel overwhelmed and sometimes even give up. When students start something new, that first impression is often the one that will last. When you overwhelm children even before they begin to feel confident, this is the fastest way for children to dislike a subject. When children subconsciously develop an aversion toward a subject, it becomes a big task to undo the damage. The exponentially incremental approach tells us that we should avoid starting our courses by throwing too much at our students. Instead, the beginning phase should concentrate on giving students confirmation of their own abilities. The course should move slowly and give students the opportunity to ace tests. Once we have built confidence among the students, we can begin moving the pace faster. Lastly, our schools have neglected the concept of learning as a byproduct. In our schools, learning has always been the goal itself. But notice that by making learning the only goal, we are giving our students little incentive to learn. In other words, if learning itself is not enough incentive, the student is out of luck. If we study the entertainment industry closely, we see that it does exactly the opposite. By giving people a wide variety of incentives, the entertainment industry maximizes the motivation level of every individual. If we in education are able to implement this idea, our students may get different things in the end, but they will all learn the same material to get there. This in my view is the best way to optimize the desire of learning for our students. This idea of learning as a byproduct has already been implemented locally with great success. One of my favorite examples of this implementation is the Alice project at Carnegie Mellon University, created by Randy Pausch. It is a program that allows kids to create their own 3D animation and videos. But as a byproduct of using this program, kids end up learning the basic ideas of computer programming. Kids improve their problem solving skills as well as learn the basic building blocks of a computer program. According to Randy Pausch, goal-orientated learning involves “head fakes” because learning can be hidden in fun activities. Based on observations like these, I believe that teaching actual facts is not itself the most important job of a teacher. In my opinion, teachers are most valuable when they spark initial interest and motivation in kids to give a subject a try. Without interest, teaching automatically becomes an uphill climb. The second most valuable asset of teachers is or should be their ability to induce confidence to convince their kids that they too can become successful. Like I have mentioned before, motivation gets the students to the door, but it is confidence that will carry them through. We want the kids to have a mental image of themselves being successful. It is this mental image that will sustain the motivation even when the student is going through a difficult time. The third most valuable job or asset is a teacher's ability to transfer knowledge. The previous stages of motivation and confidence building enhance the student's involvement in a subject, yet we often just skip the first two phases and jump right to teaching. If we are to use our teachers effectively, we would be better served if they spent more time on the first two stages, priming their students. Yet the same question always arises. Where are we going to find the teachers to do all this work? Classrooms without Teachers Another very interesting fact about WOW that I would like to point out is that all the learning is done without Blizzard's own direct effort. Blizzard doesn't have teachers telling the players exactly what to do. And in many cases, people end up doing research themselves if they are having difficulty with a quest. The system Blizzard has designed works so well, it literally runs by itself with minimum maintenance. The system they have developed has the ability to service over nine million people, yet the number of employees needed to support the system is relatively small. Can you imagine a couple thousand teachers supporting nine million students simultaneously? Not only do we in the education sector have much to learn about how to engage student interests, we must also learn to become more efficient. Look at the amount of money we have thrown into education in America, and yet our public school system lags behind at the international level. With all the money spent, more and more goes into feeding the bureaucracy while actual students receive little. Now, if Blizzard can create a self-running system that works this well, why can't our Department of Education do the same? Why can't our universities implement something similar? They can, of course, but making those changes will scare a lot of powerful people. There is so much bureaucracy built around our schools that there's a structural impedance that prevents any change. I concede that the task of change will be difficult, but I would not have dedicated my life to education if I had thought it to be impossible. To improve our education system, we must first spend more energy to encourage our students. This amount of extra energy requires more teachers and more attention paid to individual students. With our teachers already short staffed, underpaid, and overworked, where are we going to find the manpower and money to finance such an enterprise? In my opinion, throwing more money at this problem is not necessarily going to help much. Instead, I believe we should place more emphasis on improving the efficiency of our teachers while reducing costs. In the next section, we will talk about how we can use technology to reduce the workload of teachers while reaching out to a wider audience of students. Technological advances have always pushed society to become more efficient. Just look at the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the human race. Today, we have the technology available to induce a technological revolution in our education system. |
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