BackStage

In honor of the Scatterplot Mario Kart Wii tournament tonight (you going down, suckas), I thought I’d explain how I used Mario Kart Wii in the classroom. I hope to publish on this and present at ASA, but you get a short view of it here.

My wonderful co-author (Killa!) and I set up two MK Wii tournaments for my social psych students — 0ne control and one experimental. Basically, you lecture on minimal group dynamics (stress Sherif’s Robber’s Cave) and Tajfel’s experiments with under & over estimators and Klee v. Kandinsky. Then you have them do the dot estimation task (you can get slides here). When they arrive the day of the tournament(s), split them into teams based on over or under-estimators (really, it’s random, but you tell them that it’s based on score). You can also have a control tournament where you tell them that teams are random.

Then you play Wii. You have fun, encourage smack talk, and the like.

After the tournament, you have them fill out some kind of survey depending on what you want to stress (we used personality traits — likable, smart, etc. — but you could do resource distrubution if you wanted to use this for an inequality class). After that, you just do some simple data entry and analysis to compare different types of results. Show these and lead a discussion about them. What differences do you see? How does that vary between the “experimental group” or “random group?” Does it matter who wins? Then discuss how it’s different from minimal group paradigms (actually saw each other, knew who each other was, etc.). You can also ask how to increase differences (a game that calls for direct co-operation, like basketball, instead of taking turns) and eliminate them (through co-opperating with each other to beat the instructor. I did have one student play me, he kicked my butt).

Great news! This is actually a justifiable method. In a pre-test & post-test quiz, students who actively participated in the tournaments improved their grades MORE than those who were simply in attendance to listen to both lectures (the pre-test and post-test lecture days). I won’t present the statistics here, but there is clear evidence that playing Mario Kart Wii IMPROVES GRADES!!! (Jury’s still out on whether it improves evaluations.)