What is XP, and what does it mean? What is a Grockit Point, and where does it come from?
In answering these frequently-asked questions, I’ll aim to share a few of the ideas behind the learning platform that we’re building.
Experience Points (XP) and Grockit Points (GP) are two different types of rewards available in Grockit games. Try playing for a little while, and you’re likely to earn some of each. A cursory explanation is that XP is awarded by the system based on your response accuracy, while GP is awarded by your peers when they find that you’ve been particularly helpful.1 The idea here is to reward players both for learning and for teaching. In motivating collaborative learning among peers, our two reward systems were designed to play complementary roles.
What I find particularly interesting about the XP and GP metrics are the way in which they reflect our two-part approach to facilitating learning: Grockit is peer-powered and data-driven.
The value of collaborating with others cannot be under-estimated. In an upcoming blog post, I’ll discuss in more detail research on the beneficial effects of well-structured peer collaborations on learning. For now, I’ll just mention a few aspects of peer-powered learning that we’d be hard-pressed to replicate with a purely data-driven approach: Your Grockit peers can provide encouragement and moral support, they can offer immediate feedback to your various questions, and they share your interest in a common learning goal. Grockit collaborations often span the globe, giving you the opportunity to learn and incorporate different problem-solving techniques and approaches. Please feel free to share in a comment your own experience with peer-powered learning in Grockit.
While the GP system reflects our valuing the power of learning with peers, the XP system reflects our value for data-driven approaches towards understanding and improving systems. Experience points are awarded for performance, and takes into account both response accuracy and problem difficulty. We’re using Item Response Theory to distill our growing database of information down to a probabilistic model of response accuracy for each Grockit question. Our first step towards incorporating this into the learning experience is in determining the XP value of each question based on the parameters of the Item Response Theory model that we’ve constructed based on single-player game response data. We’re looking forward to introducing several interesting new features based on the IRT modeling work in the upcoming months. Subscribe to this blog to guarantee that you’ll catch our upcoming announcements…
These are a few of the ways that the scoring systems in Grockit give a glimpse of the bigger picture here at Grockit, where we believe that a learning environment can be both data-driven and peer-powered.
1 Each question has an XP value associated with it, based on the difficulty of the question for previous Grockit players. If you answer the question correctly, you earn that many points. If you answer it incorrectly, you lose half that many points. As for GP, when you find that another person’s comments were particularly helpful to you, click the star next to that comment. They will then receive one Grockit Point.
