{"id":91,"date":"2012-06-06T11:05:29","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T16:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/?p=91"},"modified":"2012-07-23T09:51:07","modified_gmt":"2012-07-23T14:51:07","slug":"want-to-design-a-fun-educational-experience-about-economics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/2012\/06\/want-to-design-a-fun-educational-experience-about-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to Design a Fun Educational Experience about Economics?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Are you a good storyteller? Do you like the idea of creating a fun educational experience so compelling that people can&#8217;t help but learn new things about the economy and in turn share the experience with their friends?<\/p>\n<p>If so, let&#8217;s talk about collaboration possibilities! Think of the technologies within EconViz&#8217;s tutorials as a sort of &#8220;palette&#8221; that can be reused in new contexts, mixed in with new content and functionality. The palette includes components such as a dynamic <a title=\"Macroeconomic Circular Flow Visualizer\" href=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/macroeconomic-circular-flow-visualizer\/\">circular flow diagram<\/a> (or any flow animation), programmable <a title=\"Macroeconomic Balance Sheet Visualizer\" href=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/macroeconomic-balance-sheet-visualizer\/\">balance sheets<\/a>, and potentially much more.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/econviz-farmer.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-92\" title=\"EconViz Farmer\" src=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/econviz-farmer.png\" alt=\"EconViz Farmer\" width=\"133\" height=\"197\" \/><\/a>The <a href=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/\">existing tutorials<\/a> do include a little bit of clip art intended to make the content slightly more interesting by way of some concrete examples. But while I&#8217;ve had ideas for building upon this to create an unfolding story interleaved with the full length of the educational content, I still haven&#8217;t actually done it. And I suspect there are people who would do a much better job of building a compelling (intriguing and\/or entertaining) experience than I would. As an example, the <a title=\"How the Economy Works -- A Visual Tutorial\" href=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/how-the-economy-works-visual-tutorial\/\">How the Economy Works tutorial<\/a> could have the farmer&#8217;s and baker&#8217;s appearances extended to span much more of the length of the tutorial, adding in a governor and other characters from a local village and building some fun interactions between them&#8230; But those roles are a bit cliched in economic examples and I suspect there are some great alternatives waiting to be conceived of!<\/p>\n<p>With so many <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/create\">content creation tools<\/a> available, why EconViz as a platform? I think it has two main advantages for educational content:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Animated\/illustrated video content with high production values such as the <a title=\"RSA Animate\" href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PL39BF9545D740ECFF&amp;feature=plcp\">RSA Animate series<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/econ4.org\/films\">Econ4 demo films<\/a>, and others are fantastic at what they do. However, my experience is that to the extent that they offer a learning experience, it is because you trust what they are saying is true because you trust them as experts, but you don&#8217;t actually <em>see in tangible form why what is said is true<\/em>. One of the motivations behind EconViz was to <strong>make the actual mechanics of the economy visible<\/strong>. I&#8217;ve seen studies suggesting that this approach has the best chance of helping with &#8220;unlearning&#8221; of false notions that are at odds with the new concepts being taught. In contrast, studies seem to show that a purely anecdotal or &#8220;statement of fact&#8221; presentation of ideas that conflict with a person&#8217;s existing ideologies offer backfires and triggers a mental reinforcement of the existing ideologies!<\/li>\n<li>EconViz provides an <strong>opportunity for dynamic interaction, exploration and gamification<\/strong> that isn&#8217;t possible with standard video content. The EconViz content is designed to be interacted with &#8212; sliders, buttons, and other controls can drive the underlying models and show the results visually and immediately. Custom triggers (event-specific narration, animations, etc) could fire based on user input. Paths or outcomes could diverge based on user input. Some tutorial pages could require answering questions or altering macroeconomic flows (<em>for example &#8220;your mission: restore full employment&#8221;!<\/em>) in a certain way before the user could advance to the next page. Points and &#8220;badges&#8221; could accrue. There are plenty of options that would help reinforce the concepts presented.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Given the above two points about how EconViz is different, linear non-interactive scripts may be better suited to a traditional video format (and EconViz can&#8217;t help with that!)<\/p>\n<p>Is this too ambitious? Perhaps, but it can&#8217;t hurt to get people thinking. Maybe it leads to something feasible, maybe not, but I&#8217;ve long been excited at the possibilities, and it would be great to have collaborator(s). In the case of an ambitious undertaking, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/\">Kickstarter<\/a> would be worth considering (and might help fund a good artist, voice actor, etc as needed). My own specialty is software development &#8212; building the &#8220;engine&#8221; supporting the content and the experience.<\/p>\n<p>Interested? You can comment below this blog post or email me at <a href=\"mailto:hbl@econviz.org\">hbl@econviz.org<\/a>. And feel free to let the possibilities percolate and reply weeks or months from now&#8230; while I can&#8217;t promise to be on board with all ideas\/scripts or promise that complex ones will be feasible, if you think EconViz <em>might<\/em> be a promising platform for your vision of compelling educational content, we should at least discuss what would be involved!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Are you a good storyteller? Do you like the idea of creating a fun educational experience so compelling that people can&#8217;t help but learn new things about the economy and in turn share the experience with their friends? If so, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/2012\/06\/want-to-design-a-fun-educational-experience-about-economics\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":134,"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/econviz.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}