Results of the STEEM Classroom PlayTest

Thank you all who participated in our STEEM Classroom PlayTest today. And thanks to the MIT Teaching System Lab for coordinating!

The PlayTest was a great success. There were two sessions of 40 minutes with five participants total of varying exposure to blockchain. One participant was familiar with the underlying tech and another had never even heard the word "blockchain" before. None of them had heard of Steem or Steemit. So it was exciting be the one to tell them about Steem.

The format of the experiment was a short conversation about the blockchain, Steem, and blockchain's use in education, followed by collecting feedback in the form of comments on the original post. Ideally, each participant would have created their own Steem account, but account creation through Steemit takes a while and our time was limited, so everyone posted their feedback through the main Aprendor account.

Feedback Received:

• Can you send steem tokens for "real life" interactions?
• I wonder if used in the classroom, how to encourage students to only upvote content they think is beneficial. Would they only comment and upvote to help certain people earn tokens vs what learning material they actually find useful?
• this might be more applicable in higher education.
• How does regulation work here, if at all? You know for things like graphic content or hate speech. I understand the desire for no central control, but given everything that companies like Facebook are facing right now around fake news, I don't know how you deal with that. This is not really related to the educational application...
• The educational application here is interesting. This could solve the lack of genuine digital community behavior in LMS discussions.
• This is an interesting idea. I am wondering this might work better in higher education to encourage students to facilitate crowd sourcing in education.

Drawn Conclusions

The two aspects of Steem that people found most interesting was the rewards and the way that posts can be viewed differently depending on the portal one uses to interact with the Steem blockchain (Ex: Steemit vs Busy).

The participants liked the way that creators of content can be rewarded for their contributions. The participants were hesitant of Steem's use in a classroom setting, however. They cited the fear that giving students monetary incentive for their contribution would hinder their intrinsic motivation to learn.

It was an interesting experiment, and we look forward to incorporating this feedback into the STEEM classroom and future Steem projects.