

Show HN: We just launched badges for Khan Academy - kamens

Yesterday we added a brand new badging incentive system to the Khan Academy. It's really simple for now, round 1, blah blah all that jazz.<p>We're dealing with all types of internal debates about proper behavior to encourage and how users will respond. We've seen students in schools get extremely excited about very, very simple game mechanics attached to their practice problems/homework/etc, and building the roots of a deeper badging system seemed like an important next step to help us guide users through desired paths in the system.<p>You can check out all of our badges here http://www.khanacademy.org/badges/view (and I blogged just a bit more information at http://bjk5.com/post/2426884194/khan-academy-now-has-badges). Would love to get some feedback.
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david_shaw
This is a great idea. Khan Academy is one of the coolest learning resources
out there, and I've been happy to see it get some more coverage recently (via
Reddit).

I think you're totally right in that small game mechanics can really be the
difference between drudging through repetitve learning and having fun.

Looking forward to earning some of these badges :)

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kamens
Clickable: <http://www.khanacademy.org/badges/view>

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rick_2047
It would have been exciting (well, at least till 7th grade) if one had such a
system in schools instead of marks or grades. They are just not cool enough to
give incentive to most of the children.

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kamens
The tricky part here (as it is for grades, I suppose) is that the more these
types of rewards are used for real-life evaluation, the stronger the incentive
to cheat. While I agree that grades are fairly broken as-is for a number of
students, placing such a heavy weight on mechanics such as badges makes them
more worrisome and less fun.

In the long-term, yes, right direction...in the short-term, we have lots of
work to do first.

