Don't disincentivize picking challenging projects (change XP calculation)

[tannerwelsh]

Benefits

• Learners have a clear incentive to work on challenging projects (i.e. less tension between stats and choosing difficulty)
• Experience is a simpler metric, and thus more understandable to learners

  Description

  Critical Strategic Goals this issues impacts

• !Learner stats match our subjective reality, elicit honest feedback, and promote self-directed, collaborative growth
• !Game is balanced

When calculating XP, only include total hours and contribution, not project completeness or quality.

This way, players do not have to "water down" their project's targets so that they can get the high completeness & quality needed to gain XP. They should be choosing projects purely on relevancy and stretchiness, with XP being a product of other independent factors.

This is basically the flip side of #75

If accepted, this impacts issues #21

Changes to make:

• [x] Alter XP calculation in game-prototype #80
• [ ] Update XP threshold https://github.com/LearnersGuild/playbook/issues/65
• [ ] Back-fill XP for previous cycles in stats spreadsheets
• [ ] Update #21

  Rationale

In discussing how to create more incentive for challenge with @shereefb today, we wondered if our first step should be to remove any disincentives for challenge. The clearest place we could find for this is in XP.

The question then becomes, if we remove the disincentive, will learners seek out more challenging projects? Have we been adding unnecessary friction and barriers to learners pursuing their ZPD?

We'd like to find out, and test a different XP calculation.

[heyheyjp]

hours * contribution as the new formula is interesting and something i wouldn't have expected. thanks for taking the time to explain, @tannerwelsh.

another idea that comes to mind is to use some multiple of effectiveness. for example:

(contribution / hours) * 100

wdyt? further away from what seems like a fair representation of experience or closer? or neither?

/cc @shereefb

[heyheyjp]

i guess that would just be saying effectiveness = experience, which isn't quite right. someone who worked on a project for 5 hours but had 10% contribution would get the more experience points than someone who worked 40 hours and had 40% contribution. that seems off.

[heyheyjp]

things that could be nice to see factored into an experience rating down the road:

• some objective difficulty rating for the project and/or personal ZPD
• how many project teams you worked on

[tannerwelsh]

re: @prattsj

i guess that would just be saying effectiveness = experience, which isn't quite right

agreed. they are related, but the same.

that could be nice to see factored into an experience rating down the road

like these ideas! moved to new issue: https://github.com/LearnersGuild/game-prototype/issues/82

[tannerwelsh]

Aright we're almost ready for the full change tomorrow. Just a couple checkboxes in the description to mark off.