Wiki Race

I learned about this from a student at Hillcrest where I've been volunteering in the ICS3M Comp. Sci. class. Pick two apparently unrelated concepts like tacos and apocalypse. Beginning at the taco entry on wikipedia, two or more contestants then try to navigate to the apocalypse entry in wikipedia using just the links in the pages. It's kind of a six degrees of separation for culture jammers thing.

The pedagogically nice thing about this is the way it forces students to think laterally about how concepts are related. It also encourages an understanding of conceptual schema as hierarchical. As you get more experienced in the game, it becomes clear fairly quickly that certain higher level concepts are good waypoints to reach quickly that can then be used to drill down into the new concept area.

Take our example above:

1. Taco leads to Mexican Cuisine.
2. Mexican Cuisine leads to Mexico.
3. Mexico leads to United States.
4. United States leads to the Language and Religion anchor on the United States page.
5. The Language and Religion anchor leads to Christian.
6. Christian leads to Christian eschatology.
7. Christian eschatology leads to End Times.
8. And End Times leads to Apocalypse.

One of the keys to forging this conceptual trail is to get to the United States page. Because it's a fairly general concept the entry for United States has links to a lot of different areas of knowledge (conceptual locales). If we'd been trying to navigate to uranium, for example, we probably could have got there from United States via that page's geography anchor.

Another point to note about the game is that it can reward relatively obscure bits of knowledge. I knew, for example, that Christian eschatology would probably get me to Apocalypse but that's because of my philosophy background. Knowing that eschatology dealt with the historical arc of Christianity made that move a sensible one. It wouldn't necessarily have made sense to go that way to anyone else. Them's the breaks.