Competition in Learning

Check out Brandon Carson's article "On Winning" (http://blog.totallearner.com/2011/07/winning.html) and especially play the Merriam-Webster game link at the bottom of the article. It is crazy how adding the question difficulty and time clock helps make the game addicting.

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Permalink Reply by John McDermott on July 23, 2011 at 7:41am

So do you think that the techniques of adding a time clock and difficulty control might generally improve learning games? I think it might.

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Permalink Reply by Brandon Carson on July 23, 2011 at 2:27pm

Yes, I do. Tension can be quite motivating. In a recent "Design Thinking" class at Stanford, the instructor facilitated an activity that was timed, and was purposefully timed to NOT allow the participant to be able to complete the activity before the clock ran out. As the time counted down, students had to get more and more "creative" to complete the activity enough so that they could view it as "good enough." I think this is great because in the business world, we rarely have "enough time" to do the work we have to do, and have to get creative on how we can get enough done in the time we have.

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Permalink Reply by Jeremy J. S. B. Hall on July 24, 2011 at 11:18pm

Time Pressure Good - Too Much Pressure Bad

The problem I have found is that if you have too much time pressure there is insufficient time to reflect and this leads to what I call a "short-circuited experiential" (see http://www.simulations.co.uk/kolb.htm) where the learners do not reflect or conceptualise - they just oscillate between experimentaion and experience.

But having said that, I feel that cognitive (work) load needs to increase as the simulation progresses (see http://www.simulations.co.uk/DESIGN07.HTM) and, although largely predefined. for simple business simulations, this can be controlled by increasing or reducing the time between making decisions. For one simulation (Product Launch) that I have run many, many times, I found that some groups started quickly and then found that the problem was harder than envisaged and slowed their decision-making. In contrast, others started slowly with detailed discussion and planing but then speeded their decision-making with both groups completing the simulation in the budgeted time!