Logic Puzzle ChatBot

Kate's Logic Puzzle ChatBot

The main idea of this exercise is to show students how to create a Logic Puzzle ChatBot, using this particular bot as the model. Ideally, there’d be a repository for these chatbots for students to showcase and test their own or their classmates’ chatbot puzzles. This fosters digital literacy skills and encourages students to apply language skills in the creation of simple, concise, effective sentences. Working with other students to create a puzzle or gather answers develops their collaborative abilities; students who prefer to work alone are able to do that, should the choice be available to them.

These are the main benefits to this type of ChatBot application:

Students as makers, creators
Problem-solving, critical thinking
Chatbots and Gamification

‘While in a state of flow or while playing a game, learning is made possible through the use of concrete goals. To prevent the learner from wandering around aimlessly, a game creates goals that the user must meet before being able to progress. Malone and Lepper (1987) claimed that learners are more motivated when goals are clearly defined and when challenge is balanced in such a way that the learning process is neither too easy as to bore the learner, or too difficult such that success seems impossible. There are several ways in which an optimal level of challenge can be obtained. Malone and Lepper (1987) suggest that activities should employ varying difficulty levels of instruction, establish multiple levels of goals, vary time constraints, provide incomplete information and make the learner seek out the missing elements’ (Ciampa, 2013).

Can you complete the puzzle?

Hobbies: kickboxing, origami, sailing, ballroom dancing

Hometowns: Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary

Universities: UBC, McGill, U of T, Dalhousie

Majors: Law, Journalism, History, Engineering

Kate's Intentions and Positionality

This activity is adapted from an in-class exercise for Adult English Language Learners. Originally, I'd intended to create a bot that would allow students to practice simple written question and answer activities; I believed if the question wasn't posed properly, the bot wouldn't answer or would answer mistakenly, encouraging the learner to perfect the question so that it could be properly answered. What I quickly realized were the number of possible questions to be asked and the complexity of building a bot to serve this purpose was beyond the scope of my abilities as a beginner bot-builder. After realizing that issue could be mitigated by offering students choices rather than text-based questions or answers, the idea to use this exercise seemed fitting. What bothered me was the lack of student engagement beyond choosing numbers in a ChatBot; it seemed to fit only the S in SAMR. However, if students were encouraged to build their own logic puzzle bots, that would expand the skills they're developing in this exercise, bring it all the way up to the R in Redefinition. They'd learn to craft sentences that give only a specific amount of information, but enough to lead other students to a correct answer; they'd develop their digital literacy skills; they'd work together to create and hone their own puzzles. This seemed far better than my initial idea of typing sentences correctly.

I originally worked with Botsociety; however, after creating an entire ChatBot that included full sentences, I wasn't able to embed it into our Wix site. Despite some conversations with Botsociety's tech support (their CEO responded to me off hours on a Sunday!), I was ultimately unable to enter JavaScript code into Wix. DialogFlow and FlowXO offered simple iFrame embed codes.

I can understand how beginner bot builders may become frustrated with the initial creation of a bot. For this reason, I imagine there'd be opportunities for new ventures in ChatBots for Education: platforms or templates for instructors to easily create these Bots, or pre-built Math/Science/History ChatBots, for example. Certainly there's room for ventures in ChatBots for Language Learning; though VR seems to be a current trend in Second Language Acquisition, the specific domain of ChatBots as AI could allow learners to interact more naturally with the language. One example is Andy, a ChatBot available to learners. This article describes one Duolingo's use of their ChatBot.

As a pure beginner, creating a ChatBot requires organization and a lot of trial and error; I'd rather let the experts create our next Siri. However, if options are contained to choices or short answers, instructors and students are able to create puzzles or games that develop multiliteracy skills while reaching learning outcomes.

References:

Ciampa, K. (2013). Learning in a mobile age: An investigation of student motivation. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 30(1), 82–96. Retrieved from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcal.12036/epdf (Links to an external site.)