Aid for Groupthink
From VitalWiki
[edit] The Original Groupthink Software Specification Exercise from M.I.T.
Groupthink is a software specification game developed at M.I.T. (http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~mernst/pubs/groupthink-2006-abstract.html) It aims to teach students the importance of specifications. It is a fun, game-like group activity, through which students learn teamwork and communication in the specification process unconsciously.
To play the game, students are divided into several groups. Try to keep group sizes consistent, because smaller groups may enjoy an advantage.
Each group will be given a period of time to discuss specifications. After the discussion, several questions related with the specifications will be given to the students one by one. Each question is displayed by an overhead projector and also read by the instructors. Each facilitator raises his or her hand, then lowers it when the group finished answering; this makes it easy to look around the room and see when everyone is done. Students write their answer on a small piece of paper, turn it face down, and either give it to the facilitator or place them in the center of the table.
The facilitator then reveals the answers, ensuring anonymity and preventing teams from blaming one individual who is giving different answers than the rest. Differences in answers are a failure of the group to reach consensus and to ensure understanding, not a failure of the individual. (Alternately, the team members could retain their face-down answer sheets and reveal them after all have supplied an answer. Each facilitator may judge which way of revealing answers is best for the group.) Team members are not allowed to communicate or clarify during the game proper.
Each group receives one point for each answer with a plurality of votes, plus 10 points if all answers agreed. For example, if 3 team members answer “A”, 4 answer “B”, and 2 answer “C”, the team receives 4 points. If 1 team member answers “A”, 1 answers “B”, and 7 answer “C”, the team receives 7 points. If all 9 team members answer “B”, the team receives 19 points (9 points plus 10 bonus points).
[edit] The Ohio University Second Life Teaching Aid for the Groupthink Exercise
Slurl: http://slurl.com/secondlife/OHIO%20Outreach/144/156/32
In the traditional classroom, manually collecting the answers and calculating the points is a time-consuming and error-prone process. Therefore, we developed a teaching aid for the Groupthink game in Second Life (SL). It can also be used as a score calculating system for similar games.
In the SL game, the maximum number of members in a group is six. The rules to calculate the points are listed below:
- If all the persons in a group cannot give the same answer for a question, the group will get one point for each answer with a plurality of votes;
- If there are six persons in a group, and they all give the same answer, they will get six points plus ten bonus points;
- If there are five persons in a group, and they all give the same answer, they will get five points plus eight bonus points;
- If there are four persons in a group, and they all give the same answer, they will get four points plus seven bonus points;
- If there are three persons in a group, and they all give the same answer, they will get three points plus five bonus points;
- If there are two persons in a group, and they all give the same answer, they will get two points plus three bonus points.
The final score for each group will be calculated by summing up all the points for each question, and then dividing it by the number of members in the group. The group getting the highest score is the winner.
If this Second Life Groupthink Teaching Aid does not meet your need, you may wish to check out an alternative computer-based voting scheme, which is described in the paper at http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~mernst/pubs/groupthink-2006-abstract.html.
