A Large-Scale Educational Campaigns

Educational technology requires a delivery mechanism in order to scale. One method which has not yet seen widespread use is the educational campaign: large-scale, short-term events focused on a specific educational topic, such as the Hour of Code campaign. These are designed to generate media coverage and lend themselves nicely to collaborative or competitive goals, thus potentially leveraging social effects and community excitement to increase engagement and reach students who would otherwise not participate. In this paper, we present a case study of three such campaigns we ran to encourage students to play an algebra game, DragonBox Adaptive: the Washington, Norway, and Minnesota Algebra Challenges. We provide several design recommendations for future campaigns based on our experience, including the effects of different incentive schemes, the insertion of “tests” to fastforward students to levels of appropriate difficulty, and the strengths and weaknesses of campaigns as a method of collecting experimental data.