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A stray thought on learning and positive feedback
If you haven't used it, Duolingo is a language-learning site that's set up as a game, and a fairly fun one -- at least, it seems to work pretty well for me. You complete levels and earn points and rewards. After the year of French I took in 03/04, I started using Duolingo to keep me from forgetting it while I wasn't actively practicing it. But I got tired of it and stalled out after a little while.
I've started doing Duolingo's French course over again from the beginning, and I noticed something: they've redone the way that failure works, in a way that made it (for me, anyway) a lot more fun and rewarding to play. It used to be that if you got three wrong answers, you'd get knocked back to the beginning of the level and have to play it over again (plus you got a really unpleasant "failure noise"). But they don't do that anymore. There's no specific penalty for missing a question except that you get a few extra questions, focused on the word(s) or grammar point you got wrong.
And it makes the game SO MUCH MORE FUN and less stressful. I'm pretty sure the actual reason why I stalled out before is because I'd reached a point where I was missing words a lot, and failing to progress, and it just stopped being enjoyable. I noticed on the first couple of levels I played this time that I'd start to get tense after missing the first couple of words, and get super stressed on the next ones ... but then nothing bad happened, and I just relaxed and kept playing.
I mentioned this to my husband because he's an educator and it struck me as a useful data point regarding how people learn (or don't learn). It's just interesting to me because there is literally nothing whatsoever at stake in Duolingo, at least nothing at all that matters. There are no other people involved, so social stakes/embarrassment is not a problem; there's no grades, no money. The ONLY penalty used to be repeating the level (and having to listen to the failure buzzer), but just the repeated negative feedback of it was enough to tip me that little bit from "this is fun and rewarding" to "eh, can't be bothered".
But it's weirdly fun to get the little "happy noise" and points you get when you complete a level (once you've mastered a level, you get SPARKLES!), all out of proportion to the actual reward.
(... well, that and learning a language, obviously.)
I've started doing Duolingo's French course over again from the beginning, and I noticed something: they've redone the way that failure works, in a way that made it (for me, anyway) a lot more fun and rewarding to play. It used to be that if you got three wrong answers, you'd get knocked back to the beginning of the level and have to play it over again (plus you got a really unpleasant "failure noise"). But they don't do that anymore. There's no specific penalty for missing a question except that you get a few extra questions, focused on the word(s) or grammar point you got wrong.
And it makes the game SO MUCH MORE FUN and less stressful. I'm pretty sure the actual reason why I stalled out before is because I'd reached a point where I was missing words a lot, and failing to progress, and it just stopped being enjoyable. I noticed on the first couple of levels I played this time that I'd start to get tense after missing the first couple of words, and get super stressed on the next ones ... but then nothing bad happened, and I just relaxed and kept playing.
I mentioned this to my husband because he's an educator and it struck me as a useful data point regarding how people learn (or don't learn). It's just interesting to me because there is literally nothing whatsoever at stake in Duolingo, at least nothing at all that matters. There are no other people involved, so social stakes/embarrassment is not a problem; there's no grades, no money. The ONLY penalty used to be repeating the level (and having to listen to the failure buzzer), but just the repeated negative feedback of it was enough to tip me that little bit from "this is fun and rewarding" to "eh, can't be bothered".
But it's weirdly fun to get the little "happy noise" and points you get when you complete a level (once you've mastered a level, you get SPARKLES!), all out of proportion to the actual reward.
(... well, that and learning a language, obviously.)
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