Avatars and Ratings

The avatars are representations of ourselves that enable us to talk about our actions in the learning environment in third person (‘it’) instead of second person (‘you’). The avatars can make ratings more playful and personal. We use the avatar as a shortcut for asking questions and putting our experiences into words. In this way, we create a foundation for deeper reflection.

How?

We start by building a personal avatar that represents ourselves. We can use this to rate how we feel or how we think something went by placing it on a scale. Based on this, we can talk about why our avatar was placed there.

We use the rating to talk about the social dynamics, collaborative experiences, the learning environment, and specific goals that we are motivated to work towards. We do not rate our personal skills or performances but rather our group as a social learning group. Therefore, we can also design different kinds of rating scales.

What can we rate?

The learning environment: We place our avatars on the scale to rate how close or how far we were from experiencing excitement and joy when we collaborated.

Energy: We place our avatars in either the green, yellow, or red zone to indicate how exhausted we are.

The collaboration: We each place our avatars on a spot on what we built today. We choose the spot where we think our collaboration was most successful while building our figure.

Learning metaphor: We place our avatar by the learning metaphor that we think best fits our experience of our building.