After a first round of random interviews and having drawn basic conclusions of what we wanted to draw from people, we decided that instead of just focusing on the final experiments, we needed to focus more on the initial information retrieval so that a better experiment could be created. We met with our Liz Sanders, our instructor, who she suggested that we use exploratory research methodologies to pursue what fun learning is. The team then decided to use the information from the exploratory research to formulate an experiment that would test a hypothesis that fun learning has a greater attention span and therefore retention rate than that of standard learning. After much deliberation another student-researcher suggests that we pursue the definition of fun rather than the fun-learning topic.
On the first day of our research seminar, there was already an ongoing project with the professionals at CODA (Central Ohio Diabetes Association), who had a specific requirement of a board game that could teach children about managing childhood diabetes while maintaining a high level of playability and fun. Being more specific, this project required for the board game to be 20% educational and 80% fun. This led to an imminent question:
“What is Fun?”
Initial Objectives
Our initial idea was to prepare an experiment to demonstrate that adding fun factors to the learning process could increase results in retention, attention and the general learning experience. The first few drafts of the experiments included the creation of a lesson to be taught to an audience in the most common way: a talking head. Then we would have the same content of such lesson and “fun factors” and then compare results to see which method proved to be more effective. In order to design this experiment well, we needed to come up with those“fun factors”, and to link somehow the concepts of “fun” and “learning” in order to create the experiment mentioned above. Without a clear idea we began exploring and randomly surveying people to get opinions of what fun represents to people and to gather information about “fun learning experiences”
Early Exploration Results
All four student-researchers on the fun team came back with consistent reactions to our probing interviews. The consistent factor in all of our interviews was short, non-descriptive language that often used the word ‘fun’ in the definition of the word fun. Responses were even more limited and nondescript when we asked “what is fun-learning?” It became evident we needed to change our approach. One of the student-researchers suggested that, in an effort to get people talking and comfortable, why don’t we ask ‘What isn’t fun?” or, to juxtapose the fun-learning question, we would ask “what is the most unfun learning experience of your life?”
