title: Quantitative Pedagogy: A Digital Two Player Game to Examine Communicative Competence.
abstract: Inner concepts are much richer than the words that describe them. Our general objective is to inquire what are the best procedures to communicate conceptual knowledge. We construct a simplified and controlled setup emulating important variables of pedagogy amenable to quantitative analysis. To this aim, we designed a game inspired in Chinese Whispers, to investigate which attributes of a description affect its capacity to faithfully convey an image. This is a two player game: an emitter and a receiver. The emitter was shown a simple geometric figure and was asked to describe it in words. He was informed that this description would be passed to the receiver who had to replicate the drawing from this description. We capitalized on vast data obtained from an android app to quantify the effect of different aspects of a description on communication precision. We show that descriptions more effectively communicate an image when they are coherent and when they are procedural. Instead, the creativity, the use of metaphors and the use of mathematical concepts do not affect its fidelity.
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada, Departamento de Computación, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pabellón 1, Ciudad Universitaria, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina.|Laboratorio de Neurociencia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 7350, (C1428BCW) Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Matías
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lopez-Rosenfeld
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada, Departamento de Computación, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pabellón 1, Ciudad Universitaria, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Facundo
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Carrillo
authors.affiliation: El Mundo de las Ideas, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Gerry
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Garbulsky
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada, Departamento de Computación, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pabellón 1, Ciudad Universitaria, 1428 Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Diego
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Fernandez Slezak
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Neurociencia, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 7350, (C1428BCW) Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina.
authors.forename: Mariano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sigman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003142:Communication; D006801:Humans; D063731:Mobile Applications; D011361:Professional Competence; D000068997:Smartphone; D013663:Teaching; D055815:Young Adult