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Show HN: We just launched badges for Khan Academy
8 points by kamens on Dec 23, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Yesterday we added a brand new badging incentive system to the Khan Academy. It's really simple for now, round 1, blah blah all that jazz.

We're dealing with all types of internal debates about proper behavior to encourage and how users will respond. We've seen students in schools get extremely excited about very, very simple game mechanics attached to their practice problems/homework/etc, and building the roots of a deeper badging system seemed like an important next step to help us guide users through desired paths in the system.

You can check out all of our badges here http://www.khanacademy.org/badges/view (and I blogged just a bit more information at http://bjk5.com/post/2426884194/khan-academy-now-has-badges). Would love to get some feedback.




This is a great idea. Khan Academy is one of the coolest learning resources out there, and I've been happy to see it get some more coverage recently (via Reddit).

I think you're totally right in that small game mechanics can really be the difference between drudging through repetitve learning and having fun.

Looking forward to earning some of these badges :)


Clickable: http://www.khanacademy.org/badges/view


It would have been exciting (well, at least till 7th grade) if one had such a system in schools instead of marks or grades. They are just not cool enough to give incentive to most of the children.


The tricky part here (as it is for grades, I suppose) is that the more these types of rewards are used for real-life evaluation, the stronger the incentive to cheat. While I agree that grades are fairly broken as-is for a number of students, placing such a heavy weight on mechanics such as badges makes them more worrisome and less fun.

In the long-term, yes, right direction...in the short-term, we have lots of work to do first.




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