Lately I came across this funny new start-up company
that develops an app for educational purposes and it seems to be a great hit!
I find it very interesting, especially as it is build
upon simple but very effective psychological concept regarding students’
behavior. This is how technology and psychology change our little society.
In August last year, a new start-up was created called
Class Dojo - an application for smartphones that allows school teachers to
control the behaviour and interaction of their students. Today it is used by
tens of thousands of teachers in 30 countries, and the American NBC television
called Class Dojo best educational company in 2011.
The application works like this: each student in the
class has their own profile with their number of points. Points are awarded for
achievements (for example, creativity and persistence) and taken away for
misconduct: being late or rude. The more points you have, the higher you go on
the level scale. The teacher projects an interface directly to the whiteboard,
so that the whole class sees how happy or upset their avatars are. The result
of this approach is immediate: the first week the children are delightful about
their profiles, and therefore change their behaviour.
The secret of the big success by Class Dojo is
embedded in several major principles. The first one is the feedback in real
time - immediately after the student has done something good they get
acknowledgement. . For example, Cameron wrote an interesting report - he gets a +1
for creativity and for determination. His avatar - brown alien with one eye – is
jumping and dancing. The second principle is to focus on merits, rather than
offenses: Children need praise.
A typical process of education is based on punishment
after the student has done something bad. Class Dojo, on the other hand, prevents
the committing of misdemeanors, focusing on the achievements. Also it appears
that everyone loves getting points, even if they do not mean anything.
Class Dojo has the mort important effect on an audience
ranging from kindergarten kids up to eighth grade school students. The
structure of the application is the same for all ages and works equally well.
Responsible for this is the psychology professor at Stanford and Columbia
University, who participated in the design. However, the only feature that need
some alteration are the avatars in the form of pink dragons, which are liked by
the five-year-olds, but are not too impressive to high school students. This
problem will be solve soon by the founder of Class Dojo Sam Chaudhary and his partner, who will be working on it soon.
Besides the new designs of the avatars, in the future
there will be interfaces for pupils and their parents. While the parents are
involved in the process only as observers - every teacher can send the parents their
child's profile with the points, which he/she has earned.
I believe this application is a small step to a better
future since the development of human personality traits from an early age
leads to positive changes in all socio-economic spheres of life: from success
in your career to the happy personal relationships.
There are two things I would say about this:
ReplyDeleteThe first is, back in the day, grades were made public to the entire class; kids felt embarrassed by their poor performance and tried to do better. Then one day the school system decided that was an invasion of privacy to release the grades so they became private. The pressure was off from peers and grades slouched. This app just de-privatises grades through a third source. I would love to see a comparison of a class of kids with this app, and the teachers simply announcing the grade publicly. I would wager they would be pretty much the same (except one will be far more expensive).
Second thing is, GOOOD LUCKKK implementing this app in high schools.
By the time kids are in high school, they pretty much understand that grades are either important and they try to improve them, or they don’t care about their future and don’t try. No avatar is going to help this. Kids who want to get to a prestigious university will still try their best, and kids who don’t care will still mess around in class, if anything this gives them something more to mess around with. Points or grades, you won’t fool high school kids, especially taking into consideration how apathetic modern kids are.
I for one would be against raising taxes to implement this system.
I see where your points are coming from. I do remember the days of embarrassment when marks were made public and everyone knew exactly how you were doing.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I do not think that this is the idea of ClassDojo. I do not believe that it de-privatises grades in any way. It is not meant to show any grades in general. It is merely a reflection on the students behaviour, including being late, being creative, helping others, etc. So in fact there are no grade but only points that you can collect. Basically, it is not an academic evaluation, instead it should be used as an encouragement for some actions and dismiss others.
It is not about making kids care about greats. As far as I understood their concept is simply based on the idea to create a good social environment. To reward students for good behaviour and penalise them for bad in order to teach them appropriate social interaction.
Hi Dora - thanks so much for the great blog post - we really appreciate the support! Let us know if there's ever anything we can do for you :)
ReplyDeleteIf anyone who comes across this post has any questions for us or needs help getting set up, please don't hesitate to reach out - hello@classdojo.com! Cheers!