Gamify PBA learning materials using Bounder (a UTXO quiz game)

Ecosystem
1

Hello everyone,
I’m Mario from Italy, a graduate of the Polkadot Blockchain Academy’s founders track in Hong Kong. I have 20+ years of IT experience, 3 of which are in the blockchain industry. My focus on online education has led me to establish a successful e-learning platform and now, I’m developing eLearningDAO a fully opensource decentralized e-learning platform.
During my time at PBA, I found the economics lessons led by Jonas Gehrlein particularly insightful. The interactive approach, including simulations and gamified learning, made the material both enjoyable and informative. It was fun to learn.
While gamification in learning isn’t a novel concept, it’s proven to enhance engagement and retention. There are successful companies like Kahoot that do this, making millions of dollars.
I propose integrating gamification into PBA assessments using the tool I’m developing called Bounder. This initiative extends beyond PBA, offering value to any online learning platform.
The prototyping has started and I’m lucky to have the support of the Tuxedo team for this initial stage as I’m adopting their framework.
Bounder is a killer application (at least in my mind :laughing:) that will show how Polkadot is not just an account-based blockchain, but also UTXO. Did you know that? :wink:

I’m looking for the support of this community to continue to build it.

Name: Bounder (Bet On Understanding)

Problem

Engaging in e-learning content is hard.
Detecting user knowledge is even harder.

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Solution

Bounder (meaning Bet on Understanding) is a Kahoot-style quiz tool. It can evaluate the student’s knowledge in a nice, easy and fun way by betting the “right” answer with tokens. Revenue from betting will be distributed across all the quiz creators. Every quiz (which is a knowledge assessment) can have multiple creators.
It can be played in a “solo mode” (like a typical e-learning process) or “multiplayer mode” (like in a classroom) where the teacher interacts with multiple students in real-time.

Summary

At eLearningDAO we are building an open-source decentralised e-learning platform, with the scope to migrate online education to web3. This is the presentation of the platform
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1DwoJDHCmf8IPLnEfao-nlgykQifxMVUhFh4i4UyHYVI/edit#slide=id.g267170fd23a_0_140
Bounder is one of the components we are going to build. It is a Kahoot-style mass adoption tool. Easy, nice & fun. A multiple-choice quiz game, where students win/lose tokens by betting on the right answers.

Content creators of the quizzes will receive revenue based on the betting results.

Summarizing what Bounder does:

  • Let users bet on quizzes to test knowledge in a gamified way

  • via a pretty & easy tool for non-crypto people

  • to pay quiz creators for their work

Currently, there is no method for detecting accurately user knowledge using multiple-choice questions.

MCQ (multiple-choice question) is a powerful tool when you want to automatically “filter” for a certain degree of student knowledge (to be focused only on who passed a certain threshold). However, for a proper evaluation, an “essay question” is still needed, which is extremely hard to properly automate (yes, AI is not yet that powerful).

So, how can we more accurately evaluate still using an MCQ approach?

One solution comes from this white paper “Evidential Multiple Choice Question” (Ev-MCQ) of Javier Diaz, Maria Rifqi, Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier.

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With Ev-MCQ, student answers are intentionally imprecise because it is necessary to set the percentage of confidence in correctness, rather than focusing solely on identifying the right answer.

Bounder evolves this concept, introducing a betting mechanism to gamify the process and incentivise the learning process.
It is based on my public patent US20230401973A which has the scope of detecting student knowledge through economic incentives.

For a visual understanding of how it works, here is a simple wireframe.

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Use case explanation

1. Introduction:

  • Alice is a student who has a certain amount of tokens as a budget to spend.

  • The budget can come from different sources such as patrons, sponsors, employers, parents and financially independent students.

  • Bruno and Carl are teachers and quiz creators. They work collaboratively on each quiz to ensure students are well evaluated. They receive tokens as incentivization for the job.

2. Quiz Creation and Token Incentives:

  • Bruno and Carl create quizzes for students.

  • For each question, Alice is asked to bet tokens on one or more answers per quiz.

  • Every quiz has a value expressed in tokens.

  • If Alice answers correctly, she wins tokens the token she bet; otherwise, she loses them.

  • She cannot win more tokens than her initial budget.

3. “Earn to Learn” Process:

  • This system promotes learning and receiving payment for deserving students.

  • It is particularly valuable in developing countries where salaries are low and students need support.

  • If Alice does not know the answer, she may skip the assessment but pay a small fee as a penalty. Bruno and Carl will receive this amount.

  • She can ask for hints in exchange for extra tokens. Again Bruno and Carl will receive it.

  • Lost tokens due to wrong answers go to Bruno and Carl.

4. Budget Management:

  • All tokens are deducted from the available budget.

  • When the budget is consumed, Alice may top-up to continue with the examination/game.

  • Bounder allows students to save the budget from wrong bets and cash out at the end of the evaluation.

5. Quiz Difficulty Balance:

  • Bruno and Carl aim to provide non-trivial quizzes that challenge students.

  • However, if quizzes are too difficult, Alice will always skip assessments and Bruno and Carl will not receive incentives.

  • If the quizzes are too easy Alice will always win and Bruno and Carl will not receive incentives.

This system encourages learning while providing financial incentives for deserving students. It’s a win-win situation where both students and creators benefit!

Business opportunity

The market opportunities in EdTech are enormous, the projected global market size is $181.3B by 2025

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/educational-technology-ed-tech-market-1066.html

and $377.85 B by 2028

https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-education-technology-market

The Top 10 Largest EdTech Companies in the world:

  1. Kahoot! AS (Oslo: KAHOT.OL)
  2. Yuanfudao
  3. Chegg, Inc. (NYSE: CHGG)
  4. BYJU’S
  5. Zuoyebang
  6. VIPKID
  7. Udemy
  8. 2U, Inc. (NASDAQ: TWOU)
  9. Coursera, Inc. (NYSE: COUR)
  10. Duolingo

Source:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-largest-edtech-companies-world-155126885.html
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/5-largest-edtech-companies-in-the-world-930988

Conclusion
A web3 competitor of Kahoot doesn’t exist yet, let’s do that and make money.
PBA students (online/offline) would benefit from this solution.
The Polkadot community will be aware of UTXO, having fun :laughing:

Let me know your feedback.

Here is my contact:
Discord: altimario
Telegram: @AltiMario
Linkedin: Mario Altimari - MLabs | LinkedIn
GitHub: AltiMario (Mario Altimari) · GitHub

8 Likes
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I’m probably a “bit” biased in my comment because I’m one of the code contributors but I must say that Bounder has a truly innovative and exciting concept! The integration of a betting mechanism to encourage students to actively participate and invest in their learning is a game-changer. I’m particularly excited about this project also because of the UTXO model adopted, it’s something new in Polkadot that we should investigate and invest in.
I hope the community will give support.

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Hi, I was in the fourth wave of the PBA developer track, and Mario told me about this idea.
An incentive system for learning fits very well in the realm of Web3. It will be very interesting to try and investigate this concept in a real scenario.

In every course, students are not equal; they learn at different speeds and have different backgrounds. I think it can be very useful for certifying the real knowledge that a student has at the end of a course.
It can also be useful for teachers who can see the truth answers and discover where students are more confused, enabling them to rethink the course based on more truthful results

What about trying this at the next PBA?

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I had the pleasure to meet Mario at the PBA in Hong Kong. Gamifying education is a very interesting topic. If done correctly, it can help students actually learn.

This is interesting. Good choice to make it easy for non-crypto people.

It would be very interesting to see the amount knowledge a student acquired by the end of the course.

This is a good balance.

Would be interesting to do a pilot at the a future PBA cohort.

Overall, I support the project.

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I was with Mario at the PBA and his initiative is genuinely exciting!
For me it’s clear that Bounder has the potential to make learning more interactive, fun, and rewarding, especially in a decentralized format.
So this could indeed fill a significant gap in the market.
Best of luck with your project!

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Two meta-analysis studies, including research in different fields, show that applying gamification in education can improve cognitive, motivational and behavioral learning outcomes with small to medium effect sizes (0.25 to 0.56) .

I would expect even less effect in non-compulsory settings with adult learners.

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I met Mario at PBA, and I understand his project; he already has a track record building in web3. For me, Bounder’s learn-to-earn platform has a lot of potential to help students worldwide improve their learning with economic support. This solution is a need in countries with average low incomes where people have to leave their studies to work.

Also, Mario has been in the web3 industry for a few years. He understands the ecosystem and has a patent to use in his solution. It is an app I support, and I hope to see a Spanish version for Mexico and latinamerica.

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Hello @mister_cole and thank you very very much for your comment. It is extremely useful to express different opinions not taking anything for granted. I love this topic and I’m happy to discuss it at any opportunity :smiley:
The paper you mentioned says also

The study suggests that gamification can effectively improve the attitude of undergraduate students of medical sciences towards learning statistics.

I would consider it a good output.
There are also books that follow this line

and several whitepapers that confirm that gamification can enhance student learning outcomes. For example:

In spite of the unprecedented popularity to use innovative gaming concepts within the educational context in order to promote active learning, engage people and solve motivational problems, there is an emerging body of research work arguing that gamification is not effective to increase neither the student’s engagement nor the learning outcomes. In this research paper, an empirical study is conducted to explore how gamification can firstly affect the student learning engagement and the interactivity level with e-learning technologies.

and in the conclusion

For the impact of gamification on the engagement, motivation and uptake for using e-learning technologies, the empirical results have revealed considerable positive impact for students who have made large contribution on the platform in terms of published content and accumulated scores.

The initial question was whether gamification is effective for learning. The results from the present meta-analysis suggest that, yes, gamification might in fact be effective when it comes to learning. However, the question of which factors contribute most to successful gamification remains partly unresolved, at least for cognitive learning outcomes

Studies demonstrate that gamification provides a real-time learning tool that allows participants to engage with complex issues effectively (Olsen & Abildgaard, 2022; Padilla et al., 2022). Additionally, it significantly enhances student engagement, task orientation, and motivation (Durrani et al., 2022; Tay et al., 2022).

the results reported in the reviewed studies are strongly positively oriented

[about gamification].

We have found evidence that gamification affected users in distinct ways based on their personality traits. Our results indicate that the effect of gamification depends on the specific characteristics of users.

Yes, you are not alone in having doubts about the effectiveness of learning through gamification. I honestly took it for granted because probably the narrative was strong in these years. This paper was enlightening. Thanks for planting the seed of doubt in me.

Your comment allows me to dig and learn. I hope that overall you like my project.
Anyway, I invite you to open another conversation about how in this solution teachers can gain much deeper insight into students’ knowledge by examining their confidence in the right answer.

I look forward to hearing from you again.

Thanks,
Mario

1 Like
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I met Mario in Hong Kong, and we had numerous discussions about this project. It would be great if this solution could be tested during one the next PBA’s, as a kind of POC.

Good luck !!

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Hey Mario!
As student I always disliked how traditional MCQs don’t capture how confident I was, and also how they need to rely on the law of large numbers to properly work.
This Ev-MCQ model seems to solve the problem while perfectly adapting to the gamification integration proposed, I would definitely love seeing it in action.

Since I guess this is meant to be fully decentralized my only doubt is about the possibility of creating fake wallets/students just to generate volume and give to a particular quiz creator a fake credibility that may lead other students to choose that particular quiz.
This is not an unsolvable problem but it requires some decisions to be made at protocol level, have you considered this scenario? What are your current ideas on this?

Anyway great proposal, wish you luck :grinning:

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Hello @aciceri and well done, you spot a problem :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
Honestly, it’s not the only one :sweat_smile: people could also use AI to bet on the right answers and win easily.
Is there a solution? Probably some solutions can cover particular aspects but not all. For example in your case, a mitigation could be a mechanism of staking for quiz creators or a reputational rate for good actors.
In professional online assessments, some platforms use the camera and the mic to catch eye-tracking, key clicks, background voices, etc. It is an automatic quality check where an auditor is triggered by alarms and manually validates specific video frames recorded.
I don’t want to go on that route at this stage, I want it simple and focused on the main concept. Perhaps this version can be just for fun where students play with tokens with no values and a future version (for academic degree purposes) uses tokens with real value but with anti-cheating mechanisms.
Thank you for your intelligent comment which allowed me to clarify an important aspect of the proposal.

Cheers,
Mario

1 Like
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Kahoot is great! I used it in a language class and it really added a good competitive but fun aspect to what we had to memorize. This would be a great user experience if we could make it as smooth as the current educational product yet be based on Polkadot.

And interested to see an application of UTXO on Polkadot. Waiting patiently for Tuxedo :slight_smile:

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Ciao @aleGiannini, thanks for your support.
I see you grasped everything :muscle: yes, it is not just a fun game but mostly a useful tool for educational purposes. It would be great to see it in future PBAs, in-person or online.
Let’s hope for the best :crossed_fingers:

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hi @wariomx and thanks for your support.
I promise you that if I get funded, I will implement it in multilingual with Spanish as the first supported language after English :revolving_hearts:

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I love kahoot and have used it in many classrooms including PBA. I love the idea of bringing it onchain, and I love that you’re using Tuxedo.

I helped prototype this project already and will continue to contribute as I can.

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Applying game theory to the academy/learning ecosystem is revolutionary. It could benefit both parties involved, promoting student engagement while improving the revenue model for content creators.
Additionally, his focus on Web3 integration aligns with the growing trends in decentralized platforms, and I love seeing you plan on using Tuxedo.
I’m glad to see people engaging with Mario’s idea from the product perspective and also from the dev community. Since this is an open-source project, we’ll have the chance to contribute and keep a close eye on how this evolves.
I see potential in Bounder and would love to see this live in Polkadot!

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education tech for me is always a bullies. the problem in education is the approach of current education is the same in hundred years, love the approach that Mario create here. I know Mario from PBA Hongkong. He is dedicated and go getter guy, never stop to make things happen. I am supported this initiative.

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I met Mario at PBA Hong Kong and I should say that I love his blending of engineering mindset with business opportunities and this Education Blockchain that Mario is proposing is another show-case of such and so I am supportive of this initiative!

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@AltiMario Good to see you developing your projects!! :smile:

I’ve been discussing and working on supporting Mario on the educational research side of the decentralised e-Learning idea for a while now, and he helped me develop my didactic and research topics further as well!

I think the use of blockchain as a technology for actual educational processes is still in the beginning and these use cases within an ecosystem can be the first step to mass adoption of this technology, especially for an area that does not really have real connections with it (I’m disregarding the age old credentialing question), so I’d highly encourage everybody to also check out the other concepts within eLearningDAO, like POCRE and POLIL :muscle:

Looking forward to the developments!

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Incentivizing valuable learning is a great concept and since Bounder building in Web3 enables interactive learning in a more verifiable, transparent and trustless way its even better.

Im in support of this idea and I think it would be great to get in the hands of students/creators.

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