Large-Scale Educational Campaigns

Abstract

Educational technology requires a delivery mechanism to scale. One method that has not yet seen widespread use is the educational campaign: large-scale, short-term events focused on a specific educational topic, such as the Hour of Code campaign. These are designed to generate media coverage and lend themselves nicely to collaborative or competitive goals, thus potentially leveraging social effects and community excitement to increase engagement and reach students who otherwise would not participate. In this article, we present a case study of three such campaigns that we ran to encourage students to play an algebra game—DragonBox Adaptive: the Washington, Norway, and Minnesota Algebra Challenges. We provide several design recommendations for future campaigns based on our experience, including the effects of different incentive schemes, the insertion of “tests” to fast-forward students to levels of appropriate difficulty, and the strengths and weaknesses of campaigns as a method of collecting experimental data.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Mar 10, 2015
Source ID
10.1145/2699760

Entities

People

  • Christy Ballweber
  • Eleanor O'rourke
  • Eric Butler
  • Phonraphee Thummaphan
  • Yun-en Liu
  • Zoran Popovic

Organizations

  • Adobe
  • Gates Foundation
  • Hewlett Foundation
  • Microsoft
  • Office of Naval Research
  • University of Washington

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Education

Readers

  • Joint Military Operations and Doctrine.
  • STEM Education
  • Systems Analysis and Design