The Teacher’s Dilemma: A game-based approach for motivating appropriate challenge among peers

The Teacher’s Dilemma: A game-based approach for motivating appropriate challenge among peers A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ari Bader-Natal In classroom-based studies, peer tutoring has proved to be an effective learning strategy, both for the tutees and for their peer tutors. Today, the increasingly widespread availability of computers and internet access in the homes and after-school programs of students offers a new venue for peer learning. In seeking to translate the successes of peer-assisted learning from the classroom to the Internet, one major hurdle to overcome is that of motivation. When teachers are no longer supervising student activity and when participation itself becomes voluntary, peer tutoring protocols may stop being educationally productive. In order to successfully leverage these peer interactions, we must find a way to facilitate and motivate learning among a group of unsupervised peers. In this dissertation, we respond to this challenge by reconceptualizing the interactions among peers within the context of a different medium: that of games. In designing a peer tutoring experience as a two-player game, we gain a valuable set of tools and techniques for affecting student participation, engagement, goals, and strategies. Our contributions: 1) We define a criteria for games – the Teacher’s Dilemma criteria – that motivates players to challenge one another with problems of appropriate difficulty; 2) We show three games that satisfy the Teacher’s Dilemma criteria