Blog 8 — Active Learning

When using the Bad News game, one of the main issues is the lack of options avail­able to the user. It seems as you could click any option, with most of the “options” only hav­ing one answer and get the same response. This does not seem to be that active, as the user can pas­sive­ly go through the sto­ry with­out hav­ing to think or have con­se­quences to the choic­es. One of the pos­i­tive attrib­ut­es to learn­ing through gam­i­fi­ca­tion is the con­se­quences and paths that change based on user inter­ac­tion, when this is tak­en away it is more sim­i­lar to read­ing a list of text. The con­tent itself and inclu­sion of images are ade­quate, yet if we are assess­ing it based on how active­ly it engages users it is quite limited. 

When learn­ing about Sketch-not­ing, it seemed like the ide­al sit­u­a­tion. Being able to be “loos­er” with notes, doo­dling and orga­niz­ing them based off of how the indi­vid­ual absorbs knowl­edge. Look­ing back to pre­vi­ous class­es of mine, I used to do this more fre­quent­ly. Includ­ing small doo­dles and charts to ref­er­ence at a lat­er date. Yet while attempt­ing to take notes on a recent jour­nal arti­cle, it seemed quite dif­fi­cult. This type of note tak­ing works depend­ing on the con­tent and lev­el of back­ground knowl­edge going into the mate­r­i­al. It was quite dif­fi­cult to break down large con­cepts and intri­cate details into bite size points, or doo­dle-able images. Com­pared to my elec­tron­ic notes for the same class, I am able to go into much more detail in a con­ver­sa­tion style with myself while typ­ing rather than the short form Sketch­note. If this infor­ma­tion was being intro­duced to me for the first time, I can see Sketch­note work­ing much bet­ter. Fol­low­ing with the mul­ti­me­dia prin­ci­ple, sig­nalling prin­ci­ple, and self-expla­na­tion prin­ci­ple in an active way.