Substitutive competition: Virtual pets as competitive buffers to alleviate possible negative influence on pupils

Although competition is regarded as a powerful motivator in game-based learning, it might have a negative influence, such as damage to confidence, on students who lose the competition. In this paper, we propose an indirect approach, substitutive competition, to alleviate such negative influences. The approach is used to develop a My-Pet v3 system, in which pupils master subject materials to make their pets stronger, and compete against each other. Specifically, pupils learn Chinese idioms in a pet-training game scenario, and their mastery of the material is related to the pets’ strength to win the competition. The result of the competition is influenced by whether pupils spend enough effort on the learning tasks. This intention is expected to alleviate the negative influence that results from direct competition. A within-subject experiment was conducted to examine the influence of substitutive competition. The results indicated that substitutive competition seems a promising scheme to maximise the power of competition. However, there were no apparent evidences in this study to demonstrate its effect to alleviate pupils’ sense of failure, as compared with other two direct competition conditions. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic: • Competition is a critical factor in technology-enhanced learning. • The possible negative influences of competitive learning should be a cause for concern. • Several approaches have been applied to learning successfully, such as anonymous competition and group competition. What this paper adds: • This paper proposes a new approach—substitutive competition. • Students prepare their substitutes, ie, virtual pets, to compete with others’ surrogates, instead of direct competition. British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 43 No 2 2012 247–258 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2011.01174.x © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2011 BERA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. • Because of the existence of buffers, students might be protected from the possible damages to confidence when they lose in the competition. • The result of the experiment showed that substitutive competition lowered students’ sense of failure, but the difference was not statistically significant. Implications for practice and/or policy: • Classrooms are a social context that has social comparison and competition. • Competitive learning is powerful but might also be harmful if the possible negative influences are not taken into account. Introduction Recently, digital game-based learning has attracted increasing attention from researchers (Alkan & Cagiltay, 2007; Connolly, Stansfield & Hainey, 2007) because it involves a series of critical elements that are also emphasised in the learning process, such as active participation, deep engagement, and learning from exploration and trials (Crawford, 1982). Thus, some researchers believe that gameplaying could be a useful pedagogy when good principles of game design are incorporated in the activity design (Gee, 2003; Norman, 1993). In other words, if students can benefit by the core values of learning theory from digital games, engaging students and teaching them how to play to win the games, digital games can be powerful in the educational settings (Šisler & Brom, 2008). However, from a review of the characteristics of digital games, ‘competition’ is seldom taken into account (Yu, Zhang, Ren, Zhao & Zhu, 2010), although it is acknowledged as a significant factor (Lo, Ji, Syu, You & Chen, 2008). This might be due to the fact that ill-designed competition possibly has a negative influence on students’ self-confidence (Chan, Chung, Ho, Hou & Lin, 1992), self-efficacy (Stapel & Koomen, 2005), attitude towards failure (Collins, Brown & Newman, 1989) or interpersonal relationships (Dunn & Goldman, 1966). To overcome these negative influences, two approaches have been investigated. The first one is the anonymous approach, which provides an anonymity mechanism to diminish the negative influences resulting from face-to-face competition (Yu, Chang, Liu & Chan, 2002; Yu & Liu, 2009). Anonymity ensures that students’ loss will not be exposed to others, which might be helpful in reducing possible damage to students’ self-confidence. The second one is the group approach, in which competition is integrated with some cooperative activities. For instance, student team achievement divisions (STAD) and team game tournaments (TGT) are such intra-team cooperation and inter-team competition modes (Ke, 2008a, b; Slavin, 1990). In these modes, students’ learning involves competition, but all of the team members share the responsibility for the result. Thus, they could alleviate the possible negative influence of losing the competition. Nevertheless, although these two approaches are helpful to the development of competitive learning, they are not always suitable for certain learning contexts, especially for individual learning contexts without an anonymity mechanism. In other words, there is a need to explore other approaches to make competitive learning be more flexible in educational practice. Design rationale Competition is a social comparison process involving the direct comparison of students’ ability in public (Cheng, Wu, Liao & Chan, 2009; Gilbert, Giesler & Morris, 1995; Mussweiler, 2003). Such direct competition might motivate students to prepare themselves for the competition, but might also result in possible negative effects. For example, the experience of accumulated failures might 248 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 43 No 2 2012 © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2011 BERA. damage students’ level of confidence, attitudes and even belief in future learning. Consequently, this study proposes an indirect approach, substitutive competition, in which students’ surrogates attend the competition instead of students themselves. More specifically, according to the relationship of involved competitors with the students themselves, competitive models can be categorised into direct competition and indirect competition. With regard to direct competition, students compete via different levels of information showing themselves from names, pictures, to embodied avatars. Because involved competitors directly represent some kinds of students’ identities in these competitive modes (ie, name-direct, picture-direct and avatar-direct models), students, to some extent, feel that they are directly involved in the competition. Consequently, these models are categorised as direct competition. With regard to indirect competition, students compete via their substitutes, such as their apprentices, students or pets. These substitutes maintain some relationship with students, but the substitutes are not students themselves. Accordingly, students could prepare, coach or train these substitutes and dispatch substitutes to attend the competition for them. In this study, we investigate the pet-indirect competitive model, of which the research questions are as follows: (1) how to design such a substitutive competition maximizing the power of competition as well as alleviating the possible negative influences; and (2) what are the influences of substitutive competitions on pupils’ perceptions when they win and lose the competition. To address the research questions, a learning system, My-Pet v3, was developed based on this approach for examining its influence on pupils. Before the My-Pet v3 system is described, two design rationales for substitutive competition are introduced first. Indirect competition: virtual pets as buffers to competition Because indirect competition holds substitutes for students, it might bring a major advantage: the substitutes as competitive buffers alleviate possible damages to pupils’ self-confidence or selfefficacy when they lose in the competition. Meanwhile, because pupils are still responsible for preparing their substitutes for competition, they might preserve the sense of achievement when they win the competition. In this study, we choose virtual pets as substitutes in competition. This is done for two reasons. First, as suggested in previous research, the relationship with virtual pets has the potential to establish deeper bond with pupils (Kusahara, 2000) because pupils tend to form an emotional attachment to their pets (Beck & Katcher, 1996; Melson, 2001). One well-known example of pet-caring is Tamagotchi, where virtual pets beep every so often to remind students to feed them (Bandai, 1996; Pesce, 2000; Webster, 1998). Although this interaction design is simple, a number of pupils interact with the virtual for a long period of time. Owing to the pets’ close relationship with pupils, we choose virtual pets as competitive substitutes. Second, previous studies have also suggested that virtual pets could act as learning companions to interact with pupils (Chen, Chou, Deng & Chan, 2007; Chen, Liao, Chien & Chan, 2011). In the concept of the open learner model, students’ learning profiles are visible so that they can be reflected by themselves (Bull, 2004; Bull & Kay, 2007; Bull & Nghiem, 2002). Consequently, virtual pets could act as substitutes of open learner model to compete against others, which is helpful to foster the awareness, communication and negotiation of their open learner models. Shaping positive attribution to the results of competition Although competition can serve as a powerful motivator to stimulate some students to learn, it is significant to be concerned with what pupils attribute to the results of competition. This is because what pupils attribute to the results will greatly influence their subsequent behaviours (Weiner, 1985, 1992). Two key factors that dominate perceived causes are ability and effort. From the educational viewpoint, pupils should also be encouraged to make effort in learning instead of Substitutive competition 249 © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2011 BERA. admiring their present abilities. This is because students have opportunities to change the result if they attribute the failure to the lack of effort, which could be controlled by themselves (Weiner, Nicrenberg & Goldstein, 1976). Other research also emphasises the importance of learning effort based on the belief that intelligence is fixed or malleable (Dweck, 2000). Those people who believe intelligence is malleable tend to attribute their failures to lack of effort. Consequently, they will seek for improvement opportunities. In contrast, those people who believe that intelligence is fixed tend to attribute their failures to the inferiority of intelligence, which could make them feel helpless if they frequently meet with failures. Moreover, it has been found that not all students realise the importance of effort (Seligman, 1990, 1994), although it is possible to help students to learn to change these beliefs that they hold through some approaches (Dweck, 2000). Accordingly, another intention for the substitutive competition is to help pupils be more aware of the significance of learning effort. On the one hand, through preparation and training of their virtual pets, pupils are encouraged to be more responsible for their current learning status and the efforts they made. On the other hand, if a pupil loses in a competition, he or she will also have a reason for the failure—ie, I did not spend sufficient time and effort to train my pet; it is not a matter of my ability. In other words, pupils’ attribution to their learning abilities has been shifted to the attribution to their effortmaking behaviours. Underpinned by such a design rationale, we hope the substitutive competition could help pupils shape their positive attribution and belief in learning efforts. My-Pet v3 system A My-Pet v3 system is developed according to the concept of substitutive competition. The target users are elementary school students. As shown in Figure 1, the learning flow of the My-Pet v3 Figure 1: Snapshots from the My-Pet v3 system 250 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 43 No 2 2012 © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2011 BERA. system involves three functions: pet nurturing, pet training and pet competition. In the pet-caring function, pupils play the part of masters to look after the pet, named My-Pet; in the pet-training function, the pupils play the part of trainers, who conduct learning tasks in a game scenario for pet training; in the pet-competition function, the pupils play the part of cheerleaders to participate in the pet competition.