The Crucible of Participant Engagement in Learning Activity Design

• In Event: FUSE Studios: An Alternative Infrastructure for Learning in Schools

Abstract

At the core of FUSE is a set of over twenty challenge sequences that ‘level up’ (in the video game sense) in complexity and difficulty. Participants are free to select which challenges to pursue, how far they want to level up in a sequence, and when to move on. Our operative philosophy is that small steps, taken in sequence and under conditions of the participant’s own choosing, can lead to new and/or growing interest and expertise. Our approach to designing these challenge sequences is very different from traditional school curricula, which are built as standardized packages that are significantly monolithic, minimally revisable, and largely indifferent to individual student interests. Our design approach is fundamentally modular and evolutionary. We count a challenge design as a success if it proves to routinely engage participants in persisting with that challenge and continuing in the sequence. If our challenges are not successful in meeting these criteria, we revise them, or if necessary, discard them. The crucible of participant engagement, as measured by persistence in working to complete challenges is central to our design approach.

Our unique evolutionary design approach is guided by quantitative data from the FUSE website that logs data whenever our participants start or complete a challenge level. This is combined with qualitative data that includes in-room observations as well as feedback about our challenges from adult program facilitators.

One example of our approach to engagement-driven redesign is Music Amplifier, an electrical engineering challenge that invites participants to construct an amplifier circuit for their phone or MP3 player on a breadboard. Data from 30 months from participants in grades 5-12 showed that, although 183 participants had started Music Amplifier, only 4% of them had completed the first level. This suggested that the challenge was attracting participants’ interest but that the vast majority of them were quitting before they could make much progress.

The Music Amplifier challenge was intended for participants who had completed a simpler electronics challenge, providing the necessary circuit design skills. However, our data indicated that many participants attempted Music Amplifier without the necessary skills, then quit (presumably out of frustration). Recognizing this pattern, we introduced two new levels that would precede the original first level: First, participants create an un-amplified circuit, and in Level 2, they add an amplifier chip and battery (adding capacitors and on/off switch in Level 3, all previously done in Level 1). By reducing the complexity of each challenge level and making them easier to tackle, we provided a more accessible pathway to the same outcome (building an amplifier), with new intermediate artifacts to keep participants interested, while decreasing frustration. Over the nine months since these changes were implemented, the new first level of Music Amplifier logged 212 starts and a completion rate of 46% (identical to the average completion rate across all challenges). After the modification, the original Level 1 (now Level 3) had 35 starts and a 49% completion rate, indicating that our redesign succeeded in supporting greater persistence and success.

Authors

• Kemi Jona, Northwestern University

• Henry Mann, Northwestern University