Quantitative Pedagogy: A Digital Two Player Game to Examine Communicative Competence

MATÍAS LÓPEZ Y ROSENFELD; FACUNDO CARRILLO; GERRY GARBULSKY; DIEGO FERNÁNDEZ SLEZAK; MARIANO SIGMAN

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2015

1932-6203

Inner concepts are much richer than the words that describe them. Our general objective isto inquire what are the best procedures to communicate conceptual knowledge. We con-struct a simplified and controlled setup emulating important variables of pedagogy amenable to quantitative analysis. To this aim, we designed a game inspired in Chinese Whispers,to investigate which attributes of a description affect its capacity to faithfully convey animage. This is a two player game: an emitter and a receiver. The emitter was shown a sim-ple geometric figure and was asked to describe it in words. He was informed that thisdescription would be passed to the receiver who had to replicate the drawing from thisdescription. We capitalized on vast data obtained from an android app to quantify the effectof different aspects of a description on communication precision. We show that descriptionsmore effectively communicate an image when they are coherent and when they are procedural. Instead, the creativity, the use of metaphors and the use of mathematical conceptsdo not affect its fidelity.