Practical Project Insights

- 26 feb -
This week started effectively thanks to our first playbook meeting and its participants. We got (literal) insights of the current tests and determined to focus on one target group for now. While keeping in mind that a more heuristical approach in general would be more desirable in the end, of course. The target school pupils are between the age of 14 and 16; “the ninth graders”. As a group with mainly internationals, we hope they will be sufficiently acquainted with the English language to make direct communication possible. Otherwise we hope the teachers are willing to fulfill the role of translator, besides our own beloved Finnish group member.

Since the most frequently conducted tests are those of mathematics and the basic languages, we will focus on those subjects first. Again, here it would be great to have a standardized framework that provides mechanisms that function across the board of the evaluation test subjects. Time will tell if feasibility and optimal achievements suit each other later on.

After discussing the test material, some difficulties showed up. Because the complexity of doing reliable evaluations over a longer period of time, we have to be careful with changing the structure of the test such that it doesn’t lose its verifying value of the previous years. This also implicates that the underlying matter being tested is determined in a strict way, while those underlying evaluation goals are not known by us.

Not only did we sharpen our project goals and restrictions, but also did we have a rapid, sometimes way out of the box brainstorm session about various elements of the new test. In between we showed our first prototype that is based on the straightforward elements of gamification.

During the rest of the week we discovered some more potential, practical risks about the use of gamification; it turns out that gamifying can actually harm test results and motivation if applied incautiously. On the other hand there are promising sounds about gamification as well, which confirms the current popularity of the concept. It seems that gamification is not harming or improving learning and testing in general, but it has specific effects on specific types of learning outcomes.

Finally, we made up a list of schools we are about to contact. Because despite all the interesting findings and brainstormed ideas we are able to gather; the real value out of the project cycle will never be revealed as long as we don’t get practical.

Link: https://tampere.demola.net/blogs/practical-project-insights#.WQX7v_mLSCg