Having a quick glance at the website and thinking back to when I was a teenager getting into EA / rationality, I get the impression that this might be most appealing to younger teenagers. I think after about the age of 15+ I would have been turned off by something that seems a bit more childish (because of how colourful and cute it is) than reading whatever actual adults were reading.
I feel like a lot of very talented teenagers actively avoid content that seems directly targeted at people their age (unless it seems very selective or something) because they don’t expect that to be as engaging / “on their level” as something targeted at university students.
I could see this working for 13-14 year olds though if that is your target audience.
Fair enough. I just felt like the website was talking down to me since the first quiz question was asking me to do some simple arithmetic and pick the correct answer.
(and later on there are yes/no quiz questions like “Is AMF likely to be helping the world?”, “Are PlayPumps effective?” etc)
Kind of reminded me of the compulsory “Value Education” class we had at my high school for a while—I didn’t disagree with the content and probably would have even verbally said that something like that class should have existed but in practice, I just ended up skipping it to read something fun and more challenging instead. So maybe I’m biased since it has a similar aesthetic to the workbooks we had for that class.
I think it’s a tradeoff between an easier question to create a success spiral, and a challenging question to spark curiosity. But you might be right that the first question is a bit too easy though – we did also get similar feedback on this question recently.
I feel like a lot of very talented teenagers actively avoid content that seems directly targeted at people their age (unless it seems very selective or something) because they don’t expect that to be as engaging / “on their level” as something targeted at university students.
FWIW I think I would also have been pretty unlikely to engage with any material explicitly pitched at adolescents or young adults after about the age of 15, maybe significantly earlier.
Yeah I agree that some talented teenagers don’t want to engage with material targeted at their age group.
I try not to use the word teenager on the site (there may be some old references), and write basically as if it’s for me at my current age without assuming the knowledge I have.
But I’m not at all sure we’ve got the tone and design right – I’d appreciate hearing if anyone finds any examples on the site of something that seems condescending, belittling, or unempowering etc..
Interested if you’d find the quizzes good for you at your current age? The existence of compulsory quizzes strikes me as sort of condescending. (I’d feel better about the vibe if the same content were framed as optional-but-encouraged puzzles.)
I think I’d find them helpful, though it’s hard to say for sure. As one data point, I’m currently at an extremely basic level of learning javascript, and I find Codecademy’s quizzes useful (as well as the project-based learning, which might be cool to replicate for EA but would take a lot of work).
FWIW the quizzes are by far our most popular feature amongst users I’m doing interviews with.
Re: making them optional. It’s possible this would be better, but if a user wants to skip a quiz they can very quickly give a dummy answer, which is an ok user experience so I’m not prioritising looking into it.
One way I’m worried we’re getting things wrong is getting the question difficulty right for more users. I think the early lessons might have questions that are too easy, and later lessons don’t build enough on each other, so there’s no scaffolding. I think we’ll prioritise working on that soon. Another feature I’m hoping to build is more quiz interaction types (from cloze and drag-and-drop on the faster end to build to open text grading on the more difficult end).
Re. skipping the quiz by putting in a dummy answer: I agree the user experience is fine if people are bought into doing the whole thing. My worry is that when I try to imagine young-me, (I think) I’d feel some allergy to the fact-of-compulsory-quizzes, because of the implicit social contract of something like “these people know better; I’m here to be judged”. Which might put me off the site (either making me stop reading, or just orient to the site as “something to be exploited” rather than “my friend to help me”).
I’m intrigued by this thread. I don’t have an informed opinion on the particular aesthetic or choice of quiz questions, but I note some superficial similarities to Coursera, Khan Academy, and TED-Ed, which are aimed at mainly professional age adults, students of all ages, and youth/students (without excluding adults) respectively.
Fun/cute/cartoon aesthetics do seem to abound these days in all sorts of places, not just for kids.
My uninformed opinion is that I don’t see why it should put off teenagers (talented or otherwise) in particular, but I weakly agree that if something is explicitly pitched at teenagers, that might be offputting!
We haven’t gotten this feedback in our user interviews yet (most have appreciated the effort to make it more visual and accessible), so I’d be curious to investigate this some more at some point.
That seems fine since you can’t appeal to every type of promising teenager anyway.
Like some folks (who might have found some EA questions very interesting/important) might bounce off pretty quickly but that’s okay because they would bounce off with positive-ish feelings about the content (similar to how they feel about recycling) so no harm done as they can be engaged by something else further down the line.
(It could also be because I’m thinking of talented teenagers (15+ year olds) as basically capable of engaging just as well with content designed for university students/adults but who need some extra resources/help with their specific circumstances rather than requiring entirely new introductory resources that in some ways feel dumbed down)
I’m overall glad that this exists, those are just random thoughts! :)
Cool! Some critical feedback:
Having a quick glance at the website and thinking back to when I was a teenager getting into EA / rationality, I get the impression that this might be most appealing to younger teenagers. I think after about the age of 15+ I would have been turned off by something that seems a bit more childish (because of how colourful and cute it is) than reading whatever actual adults were reading.
I feel like a lot of very talented teenagers actively avoid content that seems directly targeted at people their age (unless it seems very selective or something) because they don’t expect that to be as engaging / “on their level” as something targeted at university students.
I could see this working for 13-14 year olds though if that is your target audience.
Or maybe I was just a weird teenager.
I don’t think the website looks that young tbh
Fair enough. I just felt like the website was talking down to me since the first quiz question was asking me to do some simple arithmetic and pick the correct answer.
(and later on there are yes/no quiz questions like “Is AMF likely to be helping the world?”, “Are PlayPumps effective?” etc)
Kind of reminded me of the compulsory “Value Education” class we had at my high school for a while—I didn’t disagree with the content and probably would have even verbally said that something like that class should have existed but in practice, I just ended up skipping it to read something fun and more challenging instead. So maybe I’m biased since it has a similar aesthetic to the workbooks we had for that class.
I think it’s a tradeoff between an easier question to create a success spiral, and a challenging question to spark curiosity. But you might be right that the first question is a bit too easy though – we did also get similar feedback on this question recently.
FWIW I think I would also have been pretty unlikely to engage with any material explicitly pitched at adolescents or young adults after about the age of 15, maybe significantly earlier.
Yeah I agree that some talented teenagers don’t want to engage with material targeted at their age group.
I try not to use the word teenager on the site (there may be some old references), and write basically as if it’s for me at my current age without assuming the knowledge I have.
But I’m not at all sure we’ve got the tone and design right – I’d appreciate hearing if anyone finds any examples on the site of something that seems condescending, belittling, or unempowering etc..
Interested if you’d find the quizzes good for you at your current age? The existence of compulsory quizzes strikes me as sort of condescending. (I’d feel better about the vibe if the same content were framed as optional-but-encouraged puzzles.)
I think I’d find them helpful, though it’s hard to say for sure. As one data point, I’m currently at an extremely basic level of learning javascript, and I find Codecademy’s quizzes useful (as well as the project-based learning, which might be cool to replicate for EA but would take a lot of work).
FWIW the quizzes are by far our most popular feature amongst users I’m doing interviews with.
Re: making them optional. It’s possible this would be better, but if a user wants to skip a quiz they can very quickly give a dummy answer, which is an ok user experience so I’m not prioritising looking into it.
One way I’m worried we’re getting things wrong is getting the question difficulty right for more users. I think the early lessons might have questions that are too easy, and later lessons don’t build enough on each other, so there’s no scaffolding. I think we’ll prioritise working on that soon. Another feature I’m hoping to build is more quiz interaction types (from cloze and drag-and-drop on the faster end to build to open text grading on the more difficult end).
Re. skipping the quiz by putting in a dummy answer: I agree the user experience is fine if people are bought into doing the whole thing. My worry is that when I try to imagine young-me, (I think) I’d feel some allergy to the fact-of-compulsory-quizzes, because of the implicit social contract of something like “these people know better; I’m here to be judged”. Which might put me off the site (either making me stop reading, or just orient to the site as “something to be exploited” rather than “my friend to help me”).
I’m intrigued by this thread. I don’t have an informed opinion on the particular aesthetic or choice of quiz questions, but I note some superficial similarities to Coursera, Khan Academy, and TED-Ed, which are aimed at mainly professional age adults, students of all ages, and youth/students (without excluding adults) respectively.
Fun/cute/cartoon aesthetics do seem to abound these days in all sorts of places, not just for kids.
My uninformed opinion is that I don’t see why it should put off teenagers (talented or otherwise) in particular, but I weakly agree that if something is explicitly pitched at teenagers, that might be offputting!
Thanks for raising this!
We haven’t gotten this feedback in our user interviews yet (most have appreciated the effort to make it more visual and accessible), so I’d be curious to investigate this some more at some point.
That seems fine since you can’t appeal to every type of promising teenager anyway.
Like some folks (who might have found some EA questions very interesting/important) might bounce off pretty quickly but that’s okay because they would bounce off with positive-ish feelings about the content (similar to how they feel about recycling) so no harm done as they can be engaged by something else further down the line.
(It could also be because I’m thinking of talented teenagers (15+ year olds) as basically capable of engaging just as well with content designed for university students/adults but who need some extra resources/help with their specific circumstances rather than requiring entirely new introductory resources that in some ways feel dumbed down)
I’m overall glad that this exists, those are just random thoughts! :)