Notpron – very frustrating

[SueFolley]

I had a go at the Notpron puzzle and found it really difficult and extremely frustrating. I quickly gave up. I have blogged about it here: Notpron -Far too frustrating. I found the scaffolding provided in terms of the hints didn’t help me much and the level of difficulty was far too high. I gained insight into how students may feel if they feel a task is way out of their comfort zone, and that without appropriate scaffolding, they, like me, may easily give up. I usually like puzzle type games but just found this very frustrating and resorted to getting help from my son (I call it collaborating rather than cheating) and when we both got stuck, looking it up online (using my initiative rather than cheating). 🙂

[Anna Warren]

Hi Sue,

Although I commented on your blog, I thought I’d update you… My (very logical) partner hit a wall at level 6, lost his patience and gave up!

It’s an interesting claim on the front page of the site that:

16473100 visitors since August 2004

Only 29 people have been certificated for finishing the game.

That’s about 0.0001% of all players.

Notpron has 140 levels.

So are we supposed to conclude from  that that the designers consider it to be a “successful” game?

Was it their intention that it would out-fox all but the sharpest (and tenacious!) of players?

I’m trying to imagine us designing learning where only 0.0001% of students would successfully complete the task! But joking aside, I think it’s a reminder for me of the need to design learning that is challenging, but achievable. That the purpose and the outcome needs to be clear and explicit, and that there needs to be timely reward and feedback!

Anna

[SueFolley]

Hi Anna,

Thanks for the update. It is good to hear that many others including your partner didn’t get too far with it. It made me feel much better about finding it difficult :). You do raise a good point about making sure the learning activities you provide are challenging but achievable. We were able to walk away from that game as we found it hard. Students can’t do that easily with their studies.

The stats you quote on the game are very  interesting. They obviously pride  themselve in making it extremely challenging and that not many people have got to the end.  I can’t believe it has 140 levels, especially as I had enough trouble getting to level 3 :).

 

[ElizabethECharl]

Hi Anna and Sue,

I just want to echo Sue’s comments, I found it extremely frustrating and left it feeling like a dunce and it reconfirmed  my resistance to playing these games for fun.  It was not fun at all! The idea of encountering such a similar barrier whilst studying a course that I had given up time and money to undertake with this level of frustration would lead me to stop studying.  I would only have found it exceptable if it was being used to highlight a deficiency or gap in my skill set – in which case I would hope that a remedial pathway would be provided to fill that gap or lacking skill/ability.  😉

[Jillian Pawlyn]

Hi everyone,

I managed to get to level 4 and then, used the Google search box, got an error message, opened a new tab and searched in Google again, discovered a blog with potential solutions to the puzzle…. and stopped…. then thought  ‘why am I doing this?

The information about the puzzle and hints were puzzles in themselves.

Frustration out-weights the potential pleasure and feel good factor in solving the puzzle. My life is too short for this one.

If this were a course with those completion/success rates it would soon be axed.

More thoughts about games on my blog

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