3.25 Holding Learners’ Attention

Ideas we have for holding our learners’ attention in meaningful ways throughout the experiences we design? What role might form play in your ideas?

According to Dirksen, there are five effective ways of grabbing and holding the attention of learners — tell stories, introduce surprises, show “shiny things”, explain that everyone is doing it, and leverage learner habits.

We each played a little game to understand the five concept. The game I played was called “Spent”, which is a first perspective game that mock up the life of a minimal-wage-income American during financial crisis. The game significantly used stories and surprise to keep users’ attention, and also used “shiny things”, collaboration, and enable choices as secondary methods.

Our Application

Tell Stories:

Use the concept of “Game of Life” and tell the story of the learner through the lens of financial decision .

Introduce Surprise:

Besides regular decisions/ financial planning, we also plan to bring in random events to add surprise into users’ journey. For example, new job opportunities with pro and con.

Show “Shiny Thing”:

We plan to visualize the outcome of each decision (how much money the learner have currently, short term, long term), and after each round the learner receive feedback on their spending habit and their customized “retirement plan”.

Explain that everyone is doing it:

The customized “retirement plan” create incentive for learner to share with friends and cause a soft competition.

Leverage Learner Habit:

Learners would have multiple choice question when entering different financial tasks. They also have the option to go into each “island” of tasks to refresh their memory on specific knowledge or find what’s most relevant to themselves.