The scintilla.ai Method
Achieving Mastery
At scintilla.ai, we think of a healthy learning experience as a hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy sits the concept of Mastery, which is the confident use and application of knowledge in real and novel situations. Great master chefs, for example, can produce a fine dish on a limited budget. They make up recipes on the spot and work with ingredients that happen to be in season or they find foraging. They can quickly adapt to the dietary and culinary needs of their customers.
The Hundred will be a tool for learners that makes it much easier to achieve mastery. It manages to do this by guiding the learner through below mastery. Knowledge acquisition is playful, effortless and sinks in fast. Retention is boosted by the spacing effect. Practice is placed in an engaging game setting. Recall becomes precise and quick, knowledge becomes second nature, and mastery is achieved.
Pacing
Achieving Mastery comes down to pacing. It can not be achieved overnight. It requires patience and training.
It is not an accident that pacing for mastery coincides with the game cycle of popular games. In great games, players build up knowledge about the world they are set in. They acquire skills that are useful in this world. They practice patiently and consistently and they become champions. Great games pace players over many months. They avoid overwhelm (never too hard) and boredom (never too easy). Progress is challenging but realistic. Mastery is achievable and inevitable. Players love to play because the game makes the player a better person in the game world.
In Minecraft, you start an experience that often lasts for many years by punching a tree with your bare fist. Once you have achieved mastery in this world, you build a fully automated machinery using sophisticated tools. You forge impenetrable armour to protect you from the dangers of the Minecraft world. The game effortlessly progresses you from knowledge acquisition to retention to practice. The Hundred will do just that. But it will do it with real-world knowledge and with a sophisticated AI to turbo-charge the experience.
Knowledge acquisition
At the bottom of the learning hierarchy sits knowledge acquisition. The journey to mastery begins here, Making errors is inevitable at this stage. Personal preferences and cognitive skills play a role. Meaningful knowledge is a lot harder to build than abstractions.
The Hundred creates meaning in a fun and sandboxed environment where making errors is just part of the game: Longshore drift has no meaning in most people’s lives, but in the Hundred you have a fantasy world with endless opportunities to create meaning. Befriend Marvin the fisherman and go on a quest with him. Help him understand why his fishing hut is slowly being buried in sand and help him put down groynes to stop the process. Receive a meaningful reward for your efforts, not just a well-done sticker or a score on a leaderboard. Earn a mystical dragon egg that will eventually hatch and grow into a dragon you will take into your battles. It will bury opponents under piles of sand, which is an extremely effective attack and also a subconscious reminder of longshore drift every single time you launch the attack.
Retention
Knowledge acquisition is pointless without retention. On a cognitive science level, retention is produced by the spacing effect (cf. Ebbinghaus). At scintilla.ai we have years of experience of how to maximise it and how to intercept forgetting.
The main ingredient for the effect is time. While our AI can figure out that a revision of longshore drift is most effective 4 months from now, it can not incentivise you to revise when the time is ripe. An MMORPG, however, can. It can help you stay engaged for months and years. The Hundred will spawn a beast that you can beat with your sand-pile attack dragon. It also needs you to support your attack by answering the questions of a longshore drift revision quiz. You have waited for this moment for months! Finally, it is your chance to win this rare piece of epic armour you need. In passing, you also get a memory strength boost of a factor somewhere between 5 and 20.
Practice
Having knowledge in long-term memory is only a step towards mastery.
Practice takes this knowledge to a level where it can be recalled without effort. This is where The Hundred will unfold its true potential. It will offer players platforms to exchange experiences inside and outside the game. Guilds will allow players to share their experiences, exchange tips and tricks, help each other out, and compete in teams. We will support The Hundred YouTubers to record how to play the game. Players can watch how to get the sand-pile dragon and how to use it in battles. We will create an eco-system, where knowledge is kept relevant and fresh at all times.
In the real world, much of what we have ever learned is never practised and is allowed to wither away. Not so in the world of The Hundred. Longshore drift will become relevant for your game just when your mind is ready for revision. The Hundred knowledge is transferrable to the real world and you can enjoy the power of knowledge where it makes a difference.
AI support
The Hundred has many levels of AI support. The scintilla.ai spaced retrieval algorithm accelerates knowledge acquistion by a factor of 3 and can prolong retention for well paced learning habits by factors of 20 and above.
Generative AI will be an integral component of the game. Once you have shown that you have understood the concept of longshore drift and you effortlessly answer quiz questions about it, The Hundred takes you to the next level: Externalise your knowledge.
Your dragon will ask you to explain longshore drift to him and enter a conversation about it. The more knowledge you teach to your dragon, the quicker it will level up and the more effective it will become in your battles where you unlock new knowledge every day.