The thesis that you have to understand a topic well to make a really good meme about it is true IMO; I've seen memes from niche topics that were truly illuminating. But honestly that's equally true of a haiku or something similar. It's art. The level of quality that can be judged and graded at scale is too low to measure the kind of deep understanding that produces a really choice meme. If you try to make students make memes to show their understanding, the result will be >99% trash that technically expresses whatever is meant to be taught but has none of the power you hoped for when you pitched your investors and teachers. In short, as another commenter put it, "cringe af".
And it's not like you need to pay anyone to include memes in your course. What makes memes so ubiquitous is that they're stupid easy to make and consume.
Honestly I strongly disagree that you need to understand the subject very well to make a good meme. All you need is some basic common knowledge and to be funny.
Overall this seems like an incredibly stupid idea. How exactly is this any different from the thousands of free meme making tools or just going on the reddit history meme page? This seems like something only rich trust fund kids could waste their time on
But does it help people who don't understand? There's no great gain in a performance which _proves_ you know a topic well, but doesn't help teach those who don't.
Maybe exams should be either i) complete this meme template..., or ii) select 50 out of these 100 memes which are actually funny.
If you have a meme that's actually helpful, you can just include that in your classroom presentation once, you don't need a whole VC funded app. I'm not against including memes where they help, or even letting students contribute, just against forcing them to be a regular part. But as soon as they become a requirement, they'll largely stop being of value.
99% of student writing is trash already. I don't think the point is to produce great works, just to provide a more relatable way for students to engage with the material than traditional boring assignments.
Oh my god, it's the godawful out of touch "Le me going to le history class" posters that 70 year olds put up to try to reconnect with teenagers but on a business scale.
They're a place where neurotypical stupidity meets autistic stupidity. People pretend to communicate but actually they don't. They come from the same place as "bag-of-word" models and neural networks that don't understand anything but fake neurotypical privilege, taking advantage of your brain's thirst for closure, see
And it's not like you need to pay anyone to include memes in your course. What makes memes so ubiquitous is that they're stupid easy to make and consume.