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!
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!