Personality Testing using H5P

We don’t all play games the same way. One useful means by which we can categorize types of players by their style of play is through the use of Bartle Types, named after Richard Bartle who formed the characterizations from observing participants playing MUDs:

So, labelling the four player types abstracted, we get: achievers, explorers, socialisers and killers. An easy way to remember these is to consider suits in a conventional pack of cards: achievers are Diamonds (they’re always seeking treasure); explorers are Spades (they dig around for information); socialisers are Hearts (they empathise with other players); killers are Clubs (they hit people with them).

Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: players who suit MUDS“, Richard Bartles

I’m not aware of any system that categorizes university students by their behaviours and motivations and this, I think, is for the best. It is useful to remember that there will always be a percentage of students who are in the process of trying to create or discover their own motivations and personal identity, especially when we are working with young people.

I’ve been engaging in this line of thinking because I noticed that the H5P Framework offers a format called ‘Personality Quiz’ and I’ve been trying to imagine how it can be used in an educational context.

I don’t think I have properly articulated why I’ve become so intrigued by H5P. I only became aware of the H5P Framework once it was made available through eCampus Ontario for Ontario educators in the university and college some months ago. Once I learned that the HTML5 based framework allowed for both accessible and lightweight learning objects (slide presentations, quizzes, simple puzzles) that could be embedded in systems such as Blackboard, WordPress, and Drupal, I invested in the time to learn more. I’m particularly impressed that most of the items I’ve found in both Laurier’s and eCampus Ontario’s catalogues have been licenced openly to encourage re-use.

Here’s a presentation I created using the framework earlier this week:

For the last three weeks, I’ve been spending some time playing around with the formats of H5P, as previous posts in the ludo series can attest.

From the exploration I’ve done this week, I believe that by labeling the H5P format a ‘Personality Quiz’, we might be overlooking that we could use this mechanic to weigh imperfect answers and present the most compelling choice after a series of questions. This might prove to be a more efficient means of guiding a user to a particular answer rather than presenting a large number of binary choices in which every answer is a single end-node of a decision tree.

For example, in a library context we present to the user a list of different databases they might want to use when they perform research. In my place of work, each librarian chooses a subset of options and lists them on a single page, often separated into groups. Here’s the list of resources that I’ve put together as the liaison librarian for UWindsor’s School of Environmental Science: http://leddy.uwindsor.ca/earth-science

I try not to overwhelm the reader with too many choices and have opted to group the options from most specific to more general and then added some options for tools from related disciplines at the bottom of the page. This layout requires the reader to review the entire page of options before making a choice.

But what if I also presented the choices via a quiz to make this decision-making more palatable?

Screen capture of behind the scenes…

This is clearly not going to be as fun as a Buzzfeed Quiz, but it may be a better means to convey to the reader why there are so many available options and that some options may be better for some specific purposes than others. If you have any advice or experiences with this quiz – good or bad – please leave a comment and let me know.

I’m still interested in exploring further and trying other tools of Interactive Fiction to help a reader or researcher navigate through their research journey. I am working on an idea that I hope to showcase in the near future. I’m not going to tell you exactly what I’m hoping to achieve but I will let you know that it is going to be themed around the idea of the manifesto.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *