I’ve now spent two mornings watching 5th graders use Khan Academy in their classroom. The team has been splitting up to observe both 5th and 8th grade classes. It’s been thrilling to see and hear the reactions.
5th Grader: “I got 50,000 energy points last night!”
5th Grader: “I’m already on Adding and Subtracting Negative Numbers, where are you?”
Teacher: “Time’s up”
5th Graders: “Noooooo I want to finish my streak!”
The classroom I’ve visited is incredibly excited by the various rewards the software gives. In my eyes we don’t have 1/10th of the game mechanics in place that we can and will in the future, and I never would’ve expected the strength of reactions we’ve seen.
Accumulating energy points at home for fun, filling up as many stars as possible on the knowledge map, hitting higher and higher streaks of correct questions…these incentives have triggered all types of excited behavior. I’m sure it’s connected to this particular classroom’s style of teaching (the teacher is fantastic — she lets the kids explore Khan Academy entirely on their own), but it’s still great to see.
5th Grader: “How do I get help”?
The most clear problem on day 1 was the struggle to find help when a student hit a wall. Our interface wasn’t doing a great job pointing out related video content and other hints. Jason made some quick improvements that day, we deployed that night, and day 2 saw a lot more kids watching videos and fewer “I’m stuck”s. We’d love to take credit for the improvement, but it was day 2 so they’d already learned a lot about the UI.
Before Jason’s changes…
…and after.
5th Grader: [Pretending to shoot down the stars on the knowledge map] “Pew pew pew”
If anybody thought for a second (I did) that Google Maps would be too complicated of an interface for students trying to navigate a map of knowledge, they were (I was) certainly wrong for this particular class. Not a single student didn’t understand how to scroll around and zoom in and out of the map. They explored immediately, and one daredevil 5th grader zoomed out, found the furthest star away from home, and dove straight into the hardest calculus problems we offer. Didn’t last long, but he had fun and became the class hero for about 30 seconds.
Me: “See this ‘Safari’ up here, this is a brows…”
5th Grader: “Yeah I use IE at home, that must be it.”
One girl raised her hand to tell me about a bug she saw when working on Khan Academy from home last night (this wasn’t assigned homework or anything…), and when I cautiously started to probe to find out if she was suffering from x-browser woes, she understood immediately and cut me off way earlier than I would’ve expected. This made it extra clear that the particular classroom I’ve been watching is ridiculously technical, and we certainly have bigger challenges waiting for us with those less savvy.
5th Grader: “It’s PI-r-squared, you need to solve for r”
Jason and I were on opposite ends of the room and immediately looked at each other when we overheard that. On day 1, every 5th grader started, literally, at 1+1 simple addition. Most have made it past Adding and Subtracting Negative Numbers in ~2 days. At the end of day 2, two kids were already working together on basic geometry and the formula for the area of a circle. At this stage in the game, Khan Academy can’t really take credit for anybody in the classroom understanding concepts that quickly. KA *can* take credit for the fact that those two students are already challenged in a class that otherwise would’ve been moving significantly slower.
Teacher: “I’m not sure how to do that, I’ll need to watch the videos”
Sal and Shantanu talked to us about this “problem” (might not be the right word) before we saw it ourselves on day 2. One of the biggest concerns raised by schools when considering adopting a system like the Khan Academy is that teachers’ jobs immediately become much harder. They can no longer prepare for a single day or week of content, and they need to be able to help mentor a student who is working on software exercises that push the boundaries of the teacher’s knowledge. The best teachers, like those we’ve been observing, will embrace this challenge happily.
What a cool “problem” to expose.
5th Grader: “I don’t want to get a hint or watch a video — I’ll lose my streak”
Right now users are only rewarded when they work on exercises. We think this makes any non-exercise activity (such as watching videos or asking the software for hints) feel overly remedial and undesirable. We’re going to try to do a better job encouraging students to consume content that expands their knowledge instead of practicing already-known concepts. We’ll probably start by awarding energy points for listening to unwatched videos and tweaking the amount of points given for previously mastered exercises. Plus, once our badge system is in place we’ll have a whole new set of tools. More to come.
Teacher: “How can I look at my charts to see when a student has watched a video and whether or not it helped their performance?”
Today we’re meeting with all of the teachers participating in our pilot program, and we’re expecting lots of requests for better reporting on student data. Jason is already working on some mockups for teacher dashboards (and blogging about some servings of humble pie), and we’ll be blogging about other new features fairly soon.
