The convergence of ideas tends to be where creative magic happens. I am lucky to be surrounded by brilliant students at Da Vinci Schools who inspire amazing insights. One student, Natalie, has decided that her Ikigai is to help students transition beyond the default linear progression of projects. The way she explained the standard project implementation was enlightening.
Teacher assigns the project —> Student struggles —> Student turns it in for a grade
I thought that there was more to most projects, especially mine. I now realize that this was often the core of all my projects despite my attempts to make them look fancy with public displays and the latest education research. What makes Natalie special is that despite the linear process in most classes she has found success in viewing learning as an iterative cycle like the engineering design process.
Natalie finds more joy in completing assignments than her peers and believes that her process is more effective to learning than the default linear process.
I just happened to be listening to an interview with Elan Lee, creator of Exploding Kittens, and his description of a core gameplay loop collided with her push to make learning more circular in a way that has sparked a new way to think about implementing projects. We need to provide students and teachers with the tools they need to shift away from a one-time linear approach to learning to an iterative loop of growth.
Allowing students to complete multiple versions of a project is not a new idea. Unfortunately, supporting teachers and students to iterate on their work consistently with high quality feedback is yet to be implemented. Teachers have way too much to worry about to be able to create their own system and around 200 students to give feedback to in their classes. Since feedback might be the most important part of the learning process, why not make it easier and more fun to give?
That is where Elan Lee’s idea of a core gameplay loop comes into play. I was mesmerized listening to Elan talk about how he designs games to leverage a core gameplay loop to unlock the community of players. We don’t play a particular game over and over because the mechanics stand out, rather because the mechanics make it fun to hang out with the people around us.
If Exploding Kittens were just Russian Roulette in a deck of cards, it wouldn’t be very fun. Throw in the ability to diffuse the deadly bombs and give players a chance to put the bombs wherever you want in the deck, you are now trying to outsmart the players around you. We need to add a similar gameplay mechanic to projects to activate the entire community surrounding students.
Another great example of a core gameplay loop is BeReal. Getting prompted to take a picture at a random time of day is enough to get millions of people posting about their life. Make it easy to take a picture, see what your friends are up to at the same time, and create a calendar gallery of your days and you have a viral social media app.
Version 1 of Project Leo will contain a Lock and Key gameplay mechanic for projects. Just like Uno, students will hold the ability to play a card that the other players have to work from. In this case it will be version 1 of their project. Students will post what they have created along with the specific area they would like feedback. They will then have to get feedback from teachers, professionals and peers to unlock their progress and allow them to move onto version 2.
The critical piece will be to reward the teachers, professionals, and students for high quality feedback. Sal Khan and Schoolhouse.world has shown that the world is willing to help students to demonstrate their own mastery. We will expand upon that idea by rewarding quality feedback with increased levels of mastery. More to come on the implementation in a future post.
Students are no longer checking boxes on a linear path. Instead, they will see their mastery increase as they loop through the project multiple times, creating better and better versions each time. Feedback throughout the process will become a key part of the gameplay instead of an afterthought tacked onto the grade.
The only way to implement a change fundamental to the classroom experience is to build a system that is easier to use than what exists today. Project Leo has evolved into that system, and we will rollout features that helps both teachers and students get their building flywheels spinning.