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New Prototype! The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds
🕑 Added 2018-01-24 17:55:17 +0000 UTC Two weeks ago, I posted a survey so you could help me decide what explorable explanation to make next! The results are in, and today, you get to play with the prototype you voted for:THE WISDOM and/or MADNESS OF CROWDS (3 min prototype)
Here's a big thing I wanted to do differently with this project... All my past explorables only gave you a "tour guide" of a system. Here, you have to actually use what you learn to solve problems. It may not seem like a big deal, but learning-wise, it's the difference between touching & spinning individual parts of a bike, versus actually riding the bike. They're both technically "hands on", but the latter is a much deeper form of learning.
Anyway, please let me know what you think so far! (Be honest) Thanks again for helping me figure out what to make next. Speaking of which, here were the final survey scores (with 95% confidence intervals):
Understand: 3.88 +/- 0.07
Nonviolence: 3.80 +/- 0.08
Learn/Teach: 3.87 +/- 0.07
Win-Win: 3.61 +/- 0.08
Mindfulness: 3.61 +/- 0.08
Crowds: 3.94 +/- 0.07
Okay, so "Crowds" didn't have a statistically significantly higher score than "Understand" or "Learn/Teach" (p=0.10), but, whatever. If you want to analyze the stats yourself, here's the anonymized CSV! (there's some blank cells coz some peeps didn't answer all the questions)
P.S: This month I started trying to learn stats! (well, computational/bayesian stats. ain't nobody got time for old plug-and-chug formulas) I'm pretty happy I actually get to use what I've learnt to solve an actual problem. See? That's real learning.
P.P.S: What do you think of this idea: a series of mini-explorables about systems/complexity thinking, with a new episode once a month?
Comments
DoppioKy
This was quite cool. The puzzle was fairly rudimentary, but it did force an understanding of the principle to succeed. The drag-and-drop was a little tricky - I always selected the start peep fine, but I accidentally connected a couple peeps to the wrong other peeps. I would enjoy a perspective on why people gravitate toward the ones that skew the balance, in a general and real-world sense.
Nicky Case
That's a really good point! Will do that for the final version, something that just says "okay you can continue now"
Ben Goldsmith
I like what you're going for here, and the drawing/deleting felt pretty natural. One small thing I noticed was that when you have the first "draw your own network" scratchpad, I messed around with it for a bit expecting that something would happen after I'd done so. Maybe some text indicating that it's just a test-pad would be useful?
