The Inductive Games

Inspiration

Recursion is a fantastic tool for any developer to know, but all to often the first experience that a developer has with recursion is a negative one that haunts their futures and causes them to loose interest in the topic. Recursion is a fantastic tool for solving many problems and a tool that developers should be familiar with. Noting that recursion relies on inductive logic, which makes it easy to write proofs about complex systems, can we develop tools that help learners grow their mastery of inductive logic while also helping educators explain induction, and observer how their students learn induction?

What it does

This is a series of games that you can print out at home to help you learn induction or help others learn induction

How we built it

We developed a series of paper prototypes and tested it when participants of HackCUX. Inspired by Mitchel Resnick's (MIT) insights on designing construction kits that encourage creativity we seek to construct tools that are flexible for the learner to create unique and novel solutions to these logical puzzles. The first few iterations were found to be too constraining with a defined begging and end state. The middle iterations were found to be too leading with instructions that lead to some idealized state. The final instructions allow the participants to make solutions that are unique to their own understanding of the concept so that they can be challenged to explain and justify their reasoning if asked. The tool is intentionally fussy with some aspects of the puzzles that are not quite perfect, or intentionally misleading. This is intended to help the learner think critically about what information is relevant to their current reasoning and what information is not.

Challenges we ran into

We spent most of our time on paper prototyping and documentation of process, so the final digital result does not have all of the features that we built in the paper prototypes (like an abstract syntax tree language). There were many other challenges that we have embedded in other sections of this document.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The tool works really well for students that already have a inductive reasoning skills. The tool is just interesting and complicated enough that many participants are willing to keep trying to solve the problems rather than giving up early. We found that if someone does not have a good idea about how to play the game, other gamers can demonstrate their solution to another game and explain their reasoning. This then gives the player more ideas about how they will play the game while also encouraging collaboration.

What we learned

We learned some tips for paper prototyping, like get feedback early rather than moving onto more complex examples before feedback is gathered. We found that this tool does not magically help people understand inductive reasoning, although we did find that it serves as an engaging entry point for discussions on the topic.

What's next for The Inductive Games

There are three intended directions for the team. The first is to run additional workshops with the current tools to gather more feedback and iterate on the toolkit. The second is to build out some kind of social platform where people can download the games, post their own games, and experience share. The third is to construct interactive murals with local communities where people can infinitely expand the mural based on the inductive logic rules provided.

Built With

• marker
• paper
• scissors