Brandeis lab asks, how is learning spelled?Online game tests theory of educationThe key to winning a spelling bee has always been pretty straightforward. Spell the most words right, you win. Misspell a word, kiss the trophy goodbye.
But times are changing, and a team of researchers at Brandeis University has put a new spin on the traditional spelling bee format in an effort to prove their theory: that neither head-to-head competition nor pure cooperation is the best way to motivate students. The environment that best engenders education and innovation, they say, is somewhere in the middle. To test the hypothesis, they've developed spellbee.org, an online, interactive, multiplayer spelling bee geared for students in grades 2 through 8. The game is distinctive in that it sets up an entirely new relationship among players. Instead of just trying to defeat one another, players, in addition to spelling their own words right, are motivated to help one another learn. Players choose words for other competitors, and high scores come not just by spelling words correctly but by using observation and judgment to challenge opponents at an appropriate level of difficulty. "It's a whole new kind of educational technology," said Jordan Pollack, director of the Dynamical and Evolutionary Machine Organization (DEMO) laboratory at Brandeis, where the game was developed. "You're playing a video game, but because the score comes from how well you challenge each other, you end up with a teacher for every student." To play, students log on to the site, pick a nickname, and get matched with a partner -- whether in the same classroom or across the world. The two players are simultaneously shown a different list of words. They are then prompted to select words, one at a time, for their partners to spell. Each player listens to an audio recording of a sentence while reading the same sentence (with the word missing) on the screen. The player then types in the correct spelling of the missing word. Ten rounds complete a game. Kathleen McGarrity, a sixth-grade science teacher at Watertown Middle School, introduced the game to her students three years ago, while it was still in its testing phase. To her, the best part of Spellbee is that it taps into the enthusiasm students have for computers and channels that energy for something both fun and educational. "It's not just about spelling," she said. "It gets them to interact socially, and at the same time, they are learning to use the Internet in a different way and about different ideas of competition. The game really draws them in." Written by Ari Bader-Natal, a Brandeis computer science PhD candidate, Spellbee is up and running for public use. Currently, the website doesn't get many visitors -- aside from a small advertisement on Google, the researchers are relying on word of mouth to attract more users. Sharon Sherman, a professor of science and math education at The College of New Jersey and author of a book about integrating technology into elementary school classrooms, arranged for an elementary school in Trenton, N.J., to test Spellbee for three days. She observed that while some students took to the game immediately and challenged one another at various levels, some of the less-competitive students continued giving their opponents easy words. The advantages of Spellbee, Sherman said, are the new way it allows students to interact and the way it allows teachers to track student performance. "The assessment component is really helpful to a teacher in maintaining student improvement, and it helps teachers plan the next steps for each individual student," Sherman said. Asked to explain the origins of the method, Pollack cited an example of how predator and prey might adapt as they evolve to their mutual benefit. As prey would gain, over time, a thicker skin as a protection from the predators, those predators, over time, would adapt by developing sharper teeth. Thus both animals are competitors but both are gaining from the competition. Pollack, who has made headlines in the past for his work on artificial intelligence and robotics, said that Spellbee was inspired by a desire to create environments to encourage innovation. In purely competitive environments, the same students always win, he said, discouraging the others. When players can be motivated to at once do their best and help others reach their own potential, he said, that's when the most learning can occur. "Spellbee is a simple way to demonstrate this idea," Pollack said. "It doesn't matter if someone is better than you or worse than you in this game, if you understand what level of words to give." The secret is in the scoring. In a game of Spellbee, points are earned not just by spelling correctly but also by choosing the most appropriate words for your partner. So in the end, the winner is the player who has spelled more, harder words correctly and who has also chosen most accurately the words at the edge of his partner's ability. Nora Sabelli, co-director of the Center for Technology and Learning of SRI International, a nonprofit research organization in Menlo Park, Calif., said that what makes Spellbee special is the dynamic of "collaborative competition" it sets up among students. "The best way to learn is peer to peer," said Sabelli, an officer at the National Science Foundation when the organization gave Pollack a $90,000 start-up grant for Spellbee in 1999. "Finding a way to get students to compete in a new way -- not against each other, but to get better and better -- is very useful." Pollack has studied the games of nearly 1,000 anonymous users of the site. He tracks the difficulty of the words assigned, the speed -- which he equates with confidence level -- with which the answer is given, and the answers themselves. By following these trends and by observing the nature of mistakes, Pollack said he can tell just how engaged students are in the game and whether or not they are learning to choose more appropriate words for one another. The Spellbee database currently contains 2,500 words, and the game can support up to 100 players at a time, Pollack said. A newer version that will allow thousands of students to play simultaneously is on its way. The DEMO lab has other games in the works similar to Spellbee in their strategy to motivate learners. They are not yet posted online but should be by the fall, according to Brandeis PhD candidate Kristian Kime, who helps lead the project. In one, players create spatial puzzles of varying difficulty out of several brightly colored shapes and the other players must replicate them. Pollack said that in addition to achieving the scientific goals of proving the researchers' hypothesis on learning, Spellbee could produce social benefits down the road. This kind of software, he said, could be used to create low-cost, effective online tutorials for subjects such as reading and math.
"Each kid could get an individual set of lessons from a bunch of other humans in the system," Pollack said. "The net effect would be more time for teachers to focus on the parts of education that can't be automated, such as character development and creativity." © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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