#10 Engage Attention
What ideas do you have for holding your learners’ attention in meaningful ways throughout the experiences you design (reference class activities and readings as warranted)? What role might form play in your ideas?
How Do You Get Their Attention?
Today, we learned how to engage learners' attention. In her book Design for How People Learn, Julie Dirksen talks about how our brain is divided into two parts, the rider, and the elephant. While the rider is conscious, verbal, and the thinking part of the brain, the elephant tends to be automatic, emotional, and visceral. Regardless of the willingness of the learner to pay attention, the elephant would distract them away. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the characteristics of the elephant and use strategies to control the elephant to guide the learners through the learning experience.
In her book, Dirksen writes the following strategies can attract and engage the elephant.
- Tell it stories
- Surprise it
- Show it shiny things
- Tell it all the other elephants are doing it
- Leverage the elephant’s habits
Overview of the Ideas in Progress
Throughout the week, we have been working on concretizing and refining our ideas. We are developing ideas to engage students during university events such as orientation and carnival.
1. Scavenger hunt
Students will receive campus maps with assigned locations to find. The selected locations will be interesting but hidden places, such as the entrance of the steam tunnel. From each location, students will discover special artifacts such as Scotty dog, which contain index cards about best financial practices. Throughout the scavenger hunt, students will collect ten index cards that will guide them to learn important financial principles and complete a giant index card poster as a reward.
2. Board Game + App
The game and app help learners acquire knowledge and practice skills on budgeting. The board game is designed to create a safe experience to practice budgeting and principles of financial literacy. Players have to save a given portion of income while budgeting expenditure, investments, and savings in the game. In the magic circle, students will learn how to budget and plan or make decisions when unexpected expenses (such as water leak, flat tire, or injury) happen.
The following app is designed To bridge the gap between the temporary world and the ordinary world and help students master personal budgeting skills in real life. With the app, students can set a monthly and long-term saving goal and track their daily expenditure, which has the same categorization and color-coding as the board game. The app aims to keep constant maintenance and keep the skills and knowledge intact.
3. Escape Room
Multiple escape rooms will be installed. Each room will have a particular topic of financial literacy. For instance, one room will be designed with the theme of applying for credit cards. In the room, students will be given a task such as “find three benefits of having good credit scores for students”. Students will look for the hidden cards and pin the cards on the board. When they collect the cards, they can unlock a video that contains learnings about credit. Students can unlock the door for the next room by watching the video.
How Our Ideas Work to Get Attention
In our topic Financial Literacy, the importance of attention should be highlighted. Considering the stigma around the topic, it is presumable that the elephant will get easily distracted. The nebulous fear and repulsion associated with the topic will affect the learners' emotions and make them harder to keep attention in the learning process.
1. Scavenger Hunt
Applying the theories of Dirksen's, surprising the elephant will play the most significant role to hold attention. Unexpected rewards given in the hunt will keep learners engaged in the activity and proceed to the following clues. The hunting journey builds suspense and excitement to intensify the learnings. We would pay attention to designing the form of the artifacts and contents of the fact sheets attractive so that the learners would find them a pleasing surprise and be willing to remember them. We may be cautious that if the rewards don’t meet the anticipation, learners will easily get disappointed and lose interest in the remaining activities. Our goal would be to keep the attention by surprising them with rewards in each scavenger hunt location and amplifying the curiosity and anticipations throughout the experience.
Also, telling it all the other elephants are doing it would play an important role. We plan to run the scavenger hunt at university events such as orientation or carnivals. It will be a great opportunity to practice social learning. Collaboration and competition will be the key factor to keep the elephant’s attention.
2. Board Game & App
The story will play an important role in the board game & app idea. In the game, learners become the hero of their own stories. We should pay attention to making the learners feel capable while playing the game. The game should balance between suspense and boredom to keep the attention of the players and make it an interesting activity.
In designing a board game, we have the opportunity to optimize the effectiveness of visual and tactile experiences as shiny things. Well-designed cards and pawns in the game can interest the elephant. By letting the elephant play with objects, we can hold their attention. Also, the application will have an opportunity to apply visual elements and interactions to draw attention and lighten up the experience.
In addition, the competition in the board game would also be a key factor to draw the learner’s attention. However, for the application, social learning could be designed to foster both collaboration and competition. The application can be designed to make learners share their goals, achievements, and reflections.
3. Escape room
The space and objects in the escape room will naturally lead to surprises and shiny things. Learners are immersed in the limited space to give full attention to objects. We can pay attention to designing the space and objects to intrigue their curiosity and invite the learners to proactively interact with them.
For the escape room, collaboration with peers will act as a key role to keep them engaged. Learners will go through social learning by exploring the room with peers and solving puzzles together.
Next Step
We plan to conduct interviews with undergraduate students to gain more insights to develop our ideas further and narrow them down to a single solution. We plan to briefly show our ideas to observe how our potential learners might perceive them. With the collected insights, we will narrow down the idea and decide where to focus on.
