Competitive Learning: Introducing Mindrival

Why do people enjoy trivial pursuit but hate studying? Why will people eagerly scream answers at the TV when watching Jeopardy when they would hate studying for a test on the same material? Why is Scrabble so much fun when studying spelling is so boring? The answer, of course, is competition. People are naturally competitive and enjoy competing with each other, even when they would not enjoy the subject of the competition otherwise.

Now, imagine taking this concept and using it to make learning fun. This is not a new idea - almost every school teacher has played some form of jeopardy with their class as a learning experience. However, with the rapid development of the internet and browser-based software in recent years this concept of competitive learning can now be applied on a much larger and more general scale.

Enter mindrival: mindrival is a browser-based framework for competitively studying foreign-language vocabulary. Users compare their knowledge in real-time against their friends and other users studying the same material. By making the studying of this language vocabulary competitive, the act of studying becomes more enjoyable and the user is less likely to stop their studying due to boredom or lack of motivation. Furthermore, they will be able to meet and chat with other like-minded individuals and learn from each other.

While this system can ultimately be used to competitively study any subject, foreign language vocabulary was chosen as a starting point due to the size of the community of people studying it, and the availability of massive vocab lists which we can import into our system. Furthermore, foreign-language learning lends itself easily to internationalization. A Chinese-English vocabulary game is just as useful for a Chinese-speaker learning English as for an English-speaker learning Chinese. While the market for English-speakers learning other languages is large, the reverse is enormous. The majority of the world's students are learning English as a second language.

So who is behind mindrival? Mindrival is being developed by 4 students from Georgia Tech and it is an entrant in the inventure prize at Georgia Tech. If you have any good ideas to contribute, or if you find any problems we'd love to hear your feedback!