I use MobLab's Beauty Contest game during my lecture on speculation in the stock market. This is the first interactive lesson I have run all semester and the students really liked it.

I used to do hand run experiments in the classroom but they were time consuming and difficult to run. Conducting classroom experiments through MobLab is much easier. Now I can conduct more experiments and use them for more topics than I could before.

“MobLab was definitely the most popular among my students, it has a nice visual interface and is quite accessible. I would say one of the more interesting aspects of MobLab is that students viewed it more as a game than an experiment so as a result tended to act more competitively than when we are in the lab. I am not sure if this is better in terms of their learning, but led to more active participation. In the future, I want to systematically test if students react differently to phone as opposed to other methods of experimentation and if so, why?”

“If my students had their way, we’d use MobLab a lot more. It’s a good way to break up a traditional lesson that is both fun and productive.” “If their situation allows them to get access to MobLab, it seems like a no-brainer to incorporate it into an economics class. It’s fun for students, and allows them to see some of the theories they are learning in a different way. It’s one thing to show an equilibrium on a graph; it’s another to see it emerge in a game when players have limited information. I recommend going through the video instructions yourself, and experimenting with test accounts, so you can give a concise overview for your students.”

“[It’s] the best integrated software package to get these games up and running that I’ve worked with. You can teach a colleague how to get this done in ten minutes.”

As an instructor, MobLab delivers two compelling benefits. First, from the instructor’s perspective, MobLab addresses the age-old problem of getting students to participate in the classroom. Second, from the student’s perspective, learning economics using MobLab can be fun, particularly compared to lectures and textbooks! If done in a way that harnesses student competitiveness, markets and games can become incredibly engaging, putting the “social” back in “social sciences”.

“...not only does MobLab greatly simplify the task of implementing games in class, it’s highly polished presentation impresses students, and has been the most positively commented upon change to my teaching, with lots of unsolicited positive feedback both after class and in course evaluations. Also, the staff of MobLab have been tremendously responsive and helpful throughout the entire experience. I have been recommending it to everyone I know who teaches game theory, microeconomics, behavioral or even public finance. “

MobLab allows me to teach Economic theories in a fun and interactive way. Both the students and I enjoy the interface and ease of use.

We are contacting local schools to adopt experiments for classroom teaching. Initially we were planning on using Veconlab, but decided to use the new version of MobLab, which is great! I think it will be good to spread the MobLab word around!

Even my best students, the ones who come to office hours, talk to me after class and answer questions, I sometimes see them lose focus. As much as we want to learn something, we have a short attention span. If I were to lecture continuously, I would lose all of my students. Students deferring learning of material because they are unencouraged It’s intimidating to ask a question in a large lecture “Some concepts in economics are not ideal to just talk about. It is much more effective is students can learn by doing.” In a typical lecture I will do a quiz or a survey every 20 minutes to break up class time. “Midway through the semester in my classes before I used MobLab quizzes and surveys, I might have had 50% of my class showing up. At this point today, I have 80% to 90%.”

“I have used Moblab in my game theory class at Stanford. After having worked with a variety of local software for in-class games and markets, it was quickly clear to me that Moblab is an amazing product: it has a rich stable of games and market exercises, is very easy for students to use and understand, and allows the instructor to present the results immediately and clearly. The decision to join Moblab as an advisor was easy!”

“I joined MobLab as an advisor because I’m eager to see experimental economics take as large a place in teaching economics as it does in economics research. Just as experiments help you answer some questions better than you could do otherwise, experiments help you teach in ways you couldn’t do otherwise. I hope MobLab will make it easy for economists who may not do experiments themselves to incorporate experiments in their classes.”

MobLab also has the unanticipated advantage of occupying student’s mobile devices with course-relevant material, which minimizes other distractions. Students like to learn game theory by playing games and MobLab has definitely enhanced the classroom experience for them. I think that some students would prefer it if we played games using MobLab for the entire class rather than have to listen to me lecture. The start-up costs to using games in your class, especially using software like MobLab, are smaller than you may think and the rewards in terms of student understanding (not to mention teaching ratings) are greater than you may think.

“I wanted to send along a quick thank you and small recap of the games I played with some of the junior high students last week. (And an extra special thanks to Emily and Rachel for helping out last minute and in real time with some questions to make sure everything went smoothly!) I had a group of 15 8th graders, and we played beauty contest, ultimatum game, and dictator game. I though beauty contest would be their favorite but they absolutely loved the ultimatum game. I allowed them to verbally communicate with their partner, and then after a few rounds I made a "silent rule" where they had to communicate through chat. This was pretty interesting and they clearly had a harder time with this more "constrained" treatment. We played about 3 rounds of each of the 3 games, then I went over the basic concept from each of the games. The students seemed to understand the lesson, and interestingly we got some minor convergence towards lower numbers in the beauty contest game after a few repetitions. These games weren't for data collection, but I ran them more as a pilot just to see if students would understand the games, and they clearly did. I'm supposed to follow up with the after school coordinator to see what the feedback was on their end, and I'll be sure to pass along. If things go well and we can scale up, then we should open an account and get this officially going. “

I use MobLab's Beauty Contest game during my lecture on speculation in the stock market. This is the first interactive lesson I have run all semester and the students really liked it.