| I've heard of experimental classes before, where instead of a normal grading rubric that includes tests and homework and grades out of 100%, you effectively start at 0% and you do rpg like quests/tasks to gain experience points and "level up" to your final grade. I think if one has a statistics class that's aimed at giving people better statistics literacy it would be a remarkably good fit for a gamified interactive curriculum using an in class currency to make bets/predictions! You could earn currency the same way you do in games, completing mundane tasks you really don't want to do, like having every homework problem you successfully complete give you a few gold. This incentivizes studying and the effort adds some real emotional value to the currency you wager later. You could have a whole final fantasy style rpg underlayer where currency is used to buy armor/weapons to make you stronger and help you fight bigger monsters for more currency and advancing in the "game" with the ultimate goal of amassing enough currency through your activities to "buy" your A in the class or whatever. Then you could have the meat of the class be in lecture scenarios where everyone is presented with a situation that's implicitly meant to test your knowledge of a common gotcha in statistical literacy like base rate neglect in a live statistical simulation. You get to watch as your characters are subjected to "rolls" of the dice that determine their fate based on if you chose A or B. Do you believe the wizard with the diagnosing spell with a x rate of false positive/negative who says you have disease such and such with a y incidence rate? It's just the basic base rate neglect fallacy scenario, but putting people in a situation where they're incentivized to care about it and rewarded for getting it right. And by doing these simulations live in class it makes for a lot of spectacle and fun with everyone getting to gamble on these scenarios and then get to see the results play out in real time with all the suspense that gambling normally entails. You could even have group scenarios where the entire class has to pick option a or b as a whole with everyone's money collectively on the line, and have a heated discussion period where different parties are trying to explain why the class should choose a or b. Imagine being the sole voice of reason trying to valiantly explain to your class how base rate neglect works with everything on the line! This just seems like such a natural fit to me, and I'm really excited thinking about it. |
That seems like entirely too much overhead for a topic that already doesn't have enough time to teach the fundamentals properly. Not to mention that, at some point, you hit a wall of severe diminishing returns on promoting interest through gamification without enormous payoffs. People will either be engaged with the material or they won't. Your class/their grade is simply not high enough stakes for someone not interested in the material to slog through with that extra effort.
What would happen is a couple folks who would have already been motivated will suggest their answer and the rest of the room will follow one of them.
I like the 'pick and choose'-additive model you mentioned. It builds in extra credit along the way, too. 12 weekly assignments worth 5 pts apiece (say 1 question, 1 pt, they can be longer questions), 3 exams worth 20 points each.
Of course, that is merely making explicit a fairly normal system where you just don't know the assignment counts or weights beforehand.
But you could adjust it so that, instead of 12 homeworks, you can do a handful of projects that require deeper understanding. For people uninterested, just getting their credit, they can slog through the simple homework. For those motivated to learn the material more deeply, they can do the harder, deeper work (that hopefully takes less overall time - no need to punish them).