Meet the Newest Members of the Sololearn Community!
Nintendo has Mario, Disney has Mickey, Duolingo has that cute owl (you know, the one who’s adorable enough to make you feel guilty for not studying)… and now, Sololearn is bringing you some fun characters of our own!
You may have already noticed them popping up in a few places in the app. If so, great job — that means you’ve been studying! Over the coming months, you’ll be seeing more of them as they come to life in all the new features we’re busy developing.
Here to Help You on Every Step of Your Coding Journey
When you join Sololearn, you become part of a community of 22 million other coding students around the world. If you’ve ever been stuck on a lesson and asked for help in the comments, or played a coding challenge against a friend, you’ll know that your fellow Sololearn users are a fantastic source of knowledge, guidance and friendship.
Community is one of the biggest benefits of using Sololearn. And it’s one of the best ways to help you learn.
Because community is so important to us and to you, we wanted to reflect that sense of support, fun and mentorship throughout the whole learning experience. So now, even when you’re not chatting to another human, you’ll have a gang of cute characters who are full of personality, ready to greet you every time you study. We’re sure they’ll bring a little more joy to your day!
Inspired by Fun!
Learning shouldn’t be a chore. It should be something you look forward to doing every day. So, we do our best to make things fun! That means we often take inspiration from video games. Part of what makes video games so engaging is their clever use of characters. Whether they’re acting as friends, mentors, comedians or even enemies, they can create an emotional connection that keeps you coming back.
Each character has their own unique attitude and style. Over the next few months, you’ll see each character popping up in different scenarios, and you’ll start to get a sense of who each one is. Maybe you’ll even pick a favorite!
Science Says our Characters May Help You Learn
We’re a bunch of technologists who geek out on teaching people how to code, so as you can imagine, we’re pretty enthusiastic about science too. We keep up with the latest research on techniques that are proven to affect your ability to learn, and as we’ve mentioned, emotional engagement is a key factor here.
Not only are our characters cute, they can help you learn better by:
- improving your levels of engagement and creating moments of surprise that will keep your attention on what you’re doing1
- motivating you to use the app every day. This will help you make learning a regular habit and to stay committed in future2
- creating an emotional connection. Studies show that when our brains are processing positive emotions, we’re more likely to encode and retain information. Cool, huh?3
- making you laugh. Ok, so technically this might not help you learn more, but who doesn’t like a good giggle? ;)
We hope you’re as excited to meet the characters as we are. Over the next few days we’ll be introducing you to each one personally, and giving you a bit more of their back story. Follow us on Facebook [link], Instagram [link] and Twitter [link] to hear more, and tell us what you think!
References
1 “both emotion and motivation are crucial for the maintenance of psychological and physiological homeostasis, while emotional roles are particularly important in the process of encoding new information containing emotional components. The latter increases attention toward salient new information by selectively enhancing detection, evaluation, and extraction of data for memorization. In addition, motivational components promote learning and enhance subsequent memory retrieval while generalizing new events consequent to adaptive physiological changes.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5573739/
2 “Because positive feedback is effective, various social agents use positive feedback to encourage individuals to internalize or integrate new goals to their self-concept, with the expectation that these individuals will then be more committed to pursue the goal on subsequent occasions (Ryan & Deci, 2000).”
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173.4472&rep=rep1&type=pdf
3 “Numerous studies have reported that human cognitive processes are affected by emotions, including attention (Vuilleumier, 2005), learning and memory (Phelps, 2004; Um et al., 2012), reasoning (Jung et al., 2014), and problem-solving (Isen et al., 1987).”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454/full
