Quantitative pedagogy: A digital two player game to examine communicative competence

Abstract

Inner concepts are much richer than the words that describe them. Our general objective is to inquire what are the best procedures to communicate conceptual knowledge. We construct 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 an image. This is a two player game: an emitter and a receiver. The emitter was shown a simple geometric figure and was asked to describe it in words. He was informed that this description would be passed to the receiver who had to replicate the drawing from this description. We capitalized on vast data obtained from an android app to quantify the effect of different aspects of a description on communication precision. We show that descriptions more 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 concepts do not affect its fidelity.