#9 Proposing Ideas
What ideas are you proposing for the learning experience you’re designing based on Ambrose’s Model of Motivation and Salen/Zimmerman’s Magic Circle? What role might form play in your ideas?
Overview
As Team Financial Literacy goes forward with our learning experience development and plans for interviewing students we took into consideration the readings we did this week and their potential implications for our work. Through this we hope to properly assess and motivate our students while also taking into account the various open and closed methods of interaction through the magic circle.
Our team recognizes that finances tends to have rewards that only manifest in the long term. So if a student is feeling demotivated about their prospects on learning about finances efficiently and there is little to reinforce the behavior then our learners have no motivation to continue. For this reason we feel the readings are especially relevant to our current efforts. With this in mind we believe that our learners currently have avoidant goal traits if we were to go by the Ambrose chapter. In addition to this we believe that the current university environment does not support students learning of financial literacy. Were they to be mapped onto the chart below they most likely would fall into the hopeless or rejecting categories. Our goal then with the learning experiences that we will soon be discussing will be to create a more supportive learning environment and move learners to the fragile if not motivated categories.
Potential Learning Experiences
Life Finances Office/HUB
The Life Finances Office is an expansion of the current financial offices of Carnegie Mellon University. While it at first lacks the gaming aspects of the magic circle it does provide an umbrella of services that are both gamified and not. For the non-game based interactions this office provides counseling to students in how they may balance their budgets as well as other basic financial tasks. Aside from these other events, the main point of the office is to provide counseling and have a digital hub for students to understand finances further. We would consider this to be the unifying factor for many reasons to learn though it in and of itself is lacking in those reasons. It is only through the gestalt that students may truly benefit.
When students initially arrive at CMU we want to help introduce them to the campus and financial literacy through a scavenger hunt. This hunt helps to create a strong cultural start in terms of supporting our initiative which we believe will help pay many dividends going forward. To compare it to the Zimmerman reading, this may be read as a somewhat open circle. While it does allow for some flexibility there is no mistake that students are put on a path for the 3ish hours this activity may take. This activity may have some implicit value n its accomplishment as it relates to Ambrose or may have a certain social pressure to not let any teammates down. These two motivators will also be a prevalent theme in the next two artifacts.
As students proceed through their academic careers they may choose to engage with the Life Finances Office in a number of ways. Through our budgeting board game students may practice the skills they have been introduced to in a more relaxed environment compared to the real world. In addition to this we have an idea for a financial escape room to again engage students who may wish to know more about working with credit. While the scavenger hunt may have had a much more open circle in its interactions, these two activities are much more directed in their application.
