lord Claincy Ffnord said:
done, done and done. Best of luck to you, will be interested to see the results if enough people do it.
Thanks for participating. The response is big enough here. Even if the amount of applicants stays under 5, I will post a non-scientist friendly version of the research here. I mostly see people getting interested but losing interest before they get to the post-game survey. The number was just to give a sense of urgency, it's not a solid measurement.
In other news: I already have 17 escapees in the pre-game survey and 5 in the post-game survey, so the research will be published here either way, if only because you have the highest start/finish ratio.
Jordi said:
I did the surveys and played the "game". I thought it was very bad. Sorry. I gave extensive feedback in the post-game survey, so I won't get into all my criticisms here.
One thing I think might be interesting to discuss here however is how you think gamification works or should work. Because to me, this really wasn't a game. It is software for presenting and solving software design assignments that have been assigned for decades.
When I think of gamification, I think of constructs like creating competition, giving "rewards" like levels/titles/imaginary items, or having an actual game. For instance, light-Bot and Chronotron are two games that require a certain logic to solve that is also really important for programming. They don't really teach you programming itself, but they teach a skill that is relevant for it.
I'm wondering what you (and others) think makes this piece of educational software a game, and how that will facilitate learning.
I get this reaction a lot and I feel I need to elaborate a little. You can gamify in different ways, one is learning through a game, like you describe, another is to make a game around a subject, like I did. This research is not about finding the best game to teach software design. This would be very hard since this is the first game (to my knowledge) that actually tries to teach software design. Making an educational game with unknown mechanics and a subject in a relatively young field takes a lot of time and to really find the answer, it needs to be a way bigger research than I currently do. Excluding your statistics, the report is already over 50 pages and I've taken 8 months for the whole ordeal.
To summarize: What you get to see is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if the game fails, I will have a lot of data and the research is a success per definition.
I love being a scientist.