I’m blogging today from a plane, on my way home from the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. The conference — a biennial meeting of researchers who build and study software systems that help students learn — began with a number of sessions organized around specific topics, including a great workshop on Intelligent Educational Games. At this workshop, I introduced Grockit to an international group of scholars researching various uses of games in learning.

I spoke about how we leverage various game mechanics (think: XP, GP, badges, quests, leader-boards, etc) in order to help motivate and engage students in learning-conducive activities (such as helping each other!) One particularly interesting finding that I reported was on the effect of varying if and when students had access to Quests (a tailored, student-specific sequence of questions informed by our Item Response Theory model.) We found that students who could only access a Quest by “unlocking” it — by answering a specified number of questions during collaborative practice games — rated measurably higher with regards to several of the outcomes that we strive to maximize. (Perhaps the presence of an attainable goal to work towards served as a motivator for students to continue to engage?) More details are included in the short paper included in the workshop proceedings.

(While this is the first experimental outcome that we’ve published, it is only one of many randomized controlled experiments that we have run in our system. For the past several months, we’ve been relying on a custom-built split testing infrastructure to (near-effortlessly) run and evaluate small-scale experiments in any part of our system. The topic merits its own discussion, so I’ll save the details for a future blog entry…)

One of my favorite parts of a conference like this one is the opportunity to talk — face-to-face — with other people who are thinking deeply about similar issues in very different ways. In addition to the conversations in and around the Games workshop, I found myself caught up in discussions on a number of other key issues that we think about at Grockit: designing learning environments for out-of-school use, the promises and challenges inherent to peer collaboration, the scalability and adoption issues specific to educational software, striking a balance (or mix) between AI-assisted learning and peer-assisted learning, and how to use the learning data collected about students today to improve our systems for students tomorrow (both figuratively and literally.)

It’s been a full week and I’ll be happy to get off the plane. But it’s satisfying to know that on Monday morning, I have a notebook to open that is now filled with new insights and ideas about how we can better foster learning among our Grockiteers.