Brewing up Ideas

Based on the Ambrose and Dirksen models/theories we discussed, what ideas do you have for helping your learners acquire the necessary skills to gain mastery? What role might form play in your ideas?

We kicked this week off by looking at learning models and theories presented by Ambrose and Dirksen. These are our key takeaways:

(1) There are four stages of mastery

Unconscious memory → Conscious incompetence → Conscious competence → Unconcious competence

In order to design an experience that facilitates mastery, we have to be mindful of where our users are entering in this learning cycle.

(2) Learning is like riding a bike

Hear me out. When we’re constantly taking in new information, it’s like riding a bike uphill — it can get tiring very quickly. But when we’re performing familiar tasks or learned behavior, it’s like coasting downhill — it’s refreshing and easy. Designing a learning experience is much like designing the optimal bike ride — you don’t want the entire ride to be an uphill battle, and you don’t want to coast by the entire time either because where’s the challenge in that!?

In short, we need to restructure the learning experience to allow learners to acclimate and assimilate the information before moving to the next level.

(3) Provide your users with practice and feedback

In order to reach mastery, learners need to be given the opportunity to practice and synthesize new information. Learners also benefit from being able to see their progress and receive targeted feedback on how they’re doing.

This diagram illustrates an optimal learning experience where when learners are given the opportunity to practice and receive feedback on their progress.

For the past few weeks, we have been setting the foundation required to start generating ideas. We started off with the idea of “lifelong learning”, now our scope has narrowed to looking at ways to reframe and think about failure. We believe that learning how to properly deal with failure is the key step toward becoming a lifelong learner. This week we finally began to sketch out some ideas.

In these sketches, you will find metaphors that provide cues to learners on how to understand our experience — to help orient and personify.

A board game that gives learners the ability to pave their own path — moving through obstacles they encounter along the way.

An organic and self-growing visualization that celebrates community successes.

Similar to bullet journalling, this journal gives learners a space to reflect. This is an opportunity to reflect on their setbacks and ask themselves key questions that help them see the bigger picture.

Similar to the idea above, this journal provides learners with a space to reflect on their setbacks. But in this case, they’re framed as recipes. We write down recipes to document them and so that we don’t forget them — what if we did that with key moments that shape our lives.

This is a card game, where each card probes questions on failure. Each card leads to another question until eventually, the learner reaches ~clarity~. The goal is for learners to open up and to learn more about themselves.

To make this interactive, users are also able to submit their successes (reframed failures) into a database for the world to read.

We still have a long way to go and these ideas are still far from high fidelity. Our next step is to keep brainstorming, refine, and break down these experiences to see where we can find space for learners to receive feedback and practice.

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