Design Educational Games
Game Metadata
The game name is Duolingo. It was created by Luis von Ahn, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and his graduate student, Severin Hacker. Duolingo is supported on both Android and iOS. Its high-level instructional goals are to teach language and to make language learning accessible to a wide audience.
Learning Objectives
Duolingo is a mobile app that aims to help users learn languages of their choice. The only required prerequisite knowledge is knowing how to read English. In my case I chose to learn Japanese because I have always been interested in Japanese culture and would like to travel to Japan someday. Having a basic knowledge of Japanese is necessary for anyone who wants to navigate around Japan without a guide. I had no prior knowledge of Japanese before using Duolingo. For more advanced learners, Duolingo has an option to take a placement test and learn from there. For beginners like me, the app starts with the very basics. Duolingo’s Japanese course requires users to learn Hiragana and Katakana thoroughly before moving onto more Kanji and general speech. Hiragana and Katakana are two phonetic lettering systems that make up the basis of Japanese. After the user familiarizes themselves with the basics, they move on to cover various topics in Japanese such as food, home, hobbies, and activities.
I was curious about advanced learning in Duolingo, so I took the placement test for Mandarin Chinese. As a heritage speaker, I wondered how in-depth both the placement test and course would be. I scored full marks on the test, except for one question where there was an error:
The text in the question ends with 油条 (deep-fried dough stick) but the speaker said 水饺 (dumpling), which was confusing. After the test, I unlocked about 50% of the course. The rest of the course that was not unlocked, however, appeared to be more lessons of the same difficulty. There were a variety of topics covered, similar to the Japanese course. Thus I concluded that Duolingo helps introduce users to the basics of a language. It does not seem equipped to teach fluent users more in-depth aspects of language.
Game Elements
Duolingo’s main game elements include a progression system with achievements and rewards, as well as a competitive leaderboard and different leagues. Each lesson is a series of minigames such as mix-and-match words or phrases, matching images with phrases, translating phrases, and matching sounds with phrases. After completing each lesson, users can collect crowns and maintain their streak (number of consecutive days of usage). Completing certain objectives also grants achievements, which both feels rewarding and gives the user gems. Gems can be used to purchase protection or customization from the shop.
The competitive leaderboard ranks users by amount of experience (XP), with users who have the most XP being at the top. It is reset every few days. At the reset time, the users with low XP are demoted to the lower league while users with high XP are promoted to the upper league. In the later leagues, those in the middle of the leaderboard do not change leagues. Moving to higher leagues and obtaining high leaderboard rankings gives users a sense of accomplishment. Higher leagues make users feel as if they’re competing with likeminded individuals. All users are learning the same language in their respective league. There are ten leagues: bronze, silver, gold, sapphire, ruby, emerald, amethyst, pearl, obsidian, and diamond.
Players experience happiness and satisfaction when completing lessons and making progress. The achievements and leaderboard rankings can affect player emotions in a variety of ways. They feel motivated and competitive when trying to achieve a higher ranking or certain goal. Sometimes sadness is inevitable when a high ranking is lost or a streak is broken. Overall the prospect of rewards and fear of loss contributes to a fairly balanced player experience system.
Learning Principles
Duolingo employs a myriad of different learning principles. The ones I primarily recognized were testing, feedback, activating preconceptions, multimedia, spatial contiguity, temporal contiguity, and interest. I will expand on testing, feedback, and activating preconceptions, as the remaining three have been mentioned in “Game Elements”.
The testing principle is constant in Duolingo’s learning structure. After lessons, short quizzes are given to ensure that players understand principles and are able to move on to more complex lessons. Periodically, there are checkpoints, which are longer quizzes that check whether players can move onto a more advanced section. The feedback principle is very important in conjunction to the testing principle. It allows players to understand what they did right or wrong so that they can progress in their lessons. When players answer a question during a lesson, their answer flashes green if correct and red if incorrect. Additionally, a different sound effect plays to indicate whether the answer is right or wrong. There is an immediate feeling of disappointment when an answer is incorrect and a minor, subdued note plays. Lastly, activating preconceptions is one of the primary principles found in Duolingo’s lessons. In every lesson, there are always references to previous material so that players expand their knowledge rather than only focus on a specific area at a time. Prior knowledge is important, especially when it comes to learning a new language.
Overall Critique
Ultimately I think Duolingo succeeds as both a game and a learning experience. I believe it succeeds more as a learning experience than as a game, though this may be due to some preconceived notions that I had before taking this course. On the surface, it comes across as more for learning than entertainment; however, the game elements that it possesses are quick to draw players in and keep them coming back.
It’s time for your next lesson!
上课时间到了 !
