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Theory behind the Skill Trees Project
The Skill Trees templates combine a number of popular ideas into one template format, designed to be easy to use and give immediate feedback to the user. Just color in the boxes of anything you’ve already done to visualise your progress, identify skill gaps and get inspired to try new things. It includes the following concepts:
- Gamification, inspired by video game skill trees
- Goal setting, chunking tasks into small, achievable pieces
- Flexibility, and the ability to choose what to work on and how to interpret the goals to suit yourself, your interests and budget. This level of agency and choice taps into intrinsic motivation and the joy of chasing your current passion projects
- Self grading rubrics, you’re the judge of your own progress and at your own pace, no deadlines. Recognise prior learning and plan new goals to your interests and skill level
- Portfolio building instead of assessment and high-stakes testing
- Reflective Journaling, ideally off-screen and distraction free. Find out where you currently are and where you’d like to be in future.
Combining these factors, skill trees are a bit like a pre-made list of goals that you can tick off and tailor to your own journey. Some goals aren’t for everyone, and you can swap out tiles for your own preferred goals.
My goal is to place the learning journey back into the hands of the self-directed learner, giving them the power and ownership over their own upskilling journey.
Design Choices
The initial concept for creating this template had connected tiles, but it was just so messy. It became a rat’s nest, and deciding how to connect them meaningfully was tough. Sometimes the connections jump from low to high difficulty and can’t be placed next to each other. Most of the time when we’re learning skills, we jump around in difficulty and might have already completed some of the harder tiles while not realising we haven’t yet ticked off all the beginner tiles.
In video games, we aren’t expected to start the main quest and finish it, one step after another. It’s often broken up into side quests and exploration, providing nice variation that makes the experience richer. It’s the same in real life, and jumping around a bit keeps the experience fresh. You might get taught a more advanced skill by a visiting friend or stumble across something new you’d like to try, all experiences you’d naturally get without worrying too much as to whether it’s at your level.
Using hexagonal tiles means the project can keep a neat, consistent and recognisable look to the templates while fitting 68 goal tiles and 5 ‘set your own goal’ tiles on a single piece of paper. Completing a survey with this many questions would be tedious, but seeing your progress across all these goals at once gives a sense of early accomplishment. If we make to-do lists and cross off the things we get done, we often throw them out and don’t use them to celebrate all the wins we’ve had so far. Getting a sense of where you are on your journey and what’s yet to come is hard to gauge in self directed learning.
Flexibility of Goals
Once size does not fit all, and this is true for goals. Each of us has different interests, budgets, and location availability of resources and capability. To allow equity over equality it’s important that goals are flexible for a self-directed learner. For example, on the 3D printing skill tree, the tile ‘Make your own 3D Printer Filament’ can be interpreted in a variety of ways:
Joining old pieces of filament together with a filament joiner 3D printing a coil on the bed to make your own rainbow filament combinations Buying or building a filament extruder to make your own from pellets Visiting a factory and making your own blend Ordering a custom color from a factory
These options range from low budget to high budget, and it’s up to you to decide what this goal means to you. The technology will continue to improve over time and no doubt there will be yet more creative ways to complete this goal in future.
Motivation for the Project
I began the skill trees project as a way to make sure I can continue to grow my own skill set without stagnating. I often help university students and researchers with their projects within my role as a Makerspace manager, and I want to make sure I can provide the best help I can. I’m always giving tours to visitors who often say things like ‘Wow, this would be too hard for me’ and it motivates me to find ways to make learning simpler, easier and more fun. You can see this theme in many of my other projects, including my electronics kits. Often the learning process is too technical and not visual enough. Self-directed learning is tough and it’s easy to have a failure and get discouraged. The path ahead is not always easy to see and the steps we’ve already taken are not celebrated.
My heart has been full working on the Skill trees project, and I always love to learn about the new skill areas that are submitted. I’m so grateful for all the contributors who have helped build up this repository to being such a comprehensive resource. I look forward to continuing to refine and grow the project and range of skill tree books in future.
Project Ethos & Dark Gamification
The Skill Trees project is about using gamification to help you find your skill levels, identify skill gaps and to inspire you to try new things. Using aspects of gamification like points, badging, leader boards and progress bars can help you set goals and upskill. With a distraction free, on paper experience, the original intention of this project is to give users a chance to reflect and meditate on their current selves and their journey ahead.
However, gamification can be used in ways that might incentivise short term growth but provide the wrong motivations for completion, negatively affecting growth journeys. Addictive mechanics and dark gamification have no place within the skill trees project, and I’ve outlined some examples how to avoid this below. Intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic motivation
Instead of: “If you aren’t top 10 in the class leader board, you won’t make it onto the robotics team”
Say something like: “I see that you’re x points ahead of where you were last year, great work!”
Or:
“I didn’t realise you’d done so much electronics, can we do a skill swap?”
Instead of: “You must complete five tiles by the end of the week”
Say something like:
“Pick a skill and tile to start and work through at your own pace”
Leader board mechanics should not be used to inspire toxic competition, but instead allow you to enjoy the social aspects of upskilling, including skill swaps and helping others grow their skills. Everyone works at their own pace, and it’s important in the learning process to not ‘skim the surface’ all the time but get a chance to ‘deep dive’ for topics and projects that truly resonate with us. Forcing time limits or offering large rewards on completion encourages abuse of the self grading system, and might encourage early completion of the failure related tiles, incentivising breaking parts or setting up machines to fail. The idea of ‘speed running’ real life skills is a funny concept but not to be encouraged or incentivised. Quality of work over quantity of work, and journey over destination. Choice of flexibility, not rigidity
Instead of:
_“You must build this specific object to complete this tile” _
Say something like:
“Choose a tile to work on and make something that you’re excited to create”
Lack of choice and agency can kill motivation and make participants lose interest. Bringing your own creativity and ideas is a richer experience and allows more collective learning when working with others. Sometimes this is not possible in classroom settings, but it’s worth reviewing the activity and introducing more freedom where possible. Consider giving students a problem or challenge rather than directions to the solution. When it comes to grading time, consider using student portfolios rather than graded tests. Further Reading and Resources
The Learning Game, by Ana Lorena Fabrega
Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, by Sharon L Nichols and David C Berliner
A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart
A Pedagogy of Play: Supporting playful learning in classrooms and schools, by Ben Mardell, Jen Ryan, Mara Krechevsky, Megina Baker, Savannah Schulz and Yvonne Liu Constant
A Project of One’s Own - Paul Graham
Weird Ideas that Work - Robert Sutton
The Puzzle of Motivation TED Talk - Dan Pink
How Thinking Works TED Talk - Dr. Derek Cabrera