Okay, so we probably should have seen it coming, but geez, you guys definitely went above and beyond expectations on this last challenge! In last month’s newsletter we challenged everyone to study for at least 25 hours in 25 days. It seemed to us like throwing down a gauntlet, and so we decided to call it the “Extreme Challenge.” An hour of character study a day is no joke, after all.
We predicted there were approximately 50 people that qualified for the prizes as of the 15th of last month. Well, it turns out our method of estimation was rather inaccurate. It also turns out that you guys like procrastinating and pulling a bunch of hours just before the final reckoning.
When we finally ran the scripts to dig up the actual number of winners, we found that 128 people had qualified to win the contest! Holy smokes, Batman, that’s a lot of people!
Not having foreseen the massive turnout for the contest, we scrambled and realized it would take us quite a while to figure out the ordering and shipping of so many prizes. Even as I write this I have tabs open in my browser researching the best ways to order and distribute so many sweet prizes.
Prizes aside, the real spoils of the contest are immense. Here are some facts to illustrate just how effective the challenge was at getting people to learn:
Challenge learners spent 4,176 hours studying in a 25 day period of time. On average, each winner learned more than 260 characters, and completed 23,958 separate reviews.
Monthly stats were up substantially as well. The total number of hours users spent on Skritter jumped by 17% from 8,053 to more than 9,700 hours. May’s total characters learned statistic went up by 16,403 characters over April’s, and the site retention ticked up to 90.31%.
To put all this learning into perspective, consider this:
If you enrolled in an intense college Chinese 1 class that required you to learn 25 characters a week, and you were among those that won the contest, you would have absorbed 2.9x as many characters as needed. And that figure actually underestimates the learning advantage since Skritter gives you long term retention, not the short-lived gains from cramming for weekly quizzes.
Or perhaps this:
If you took the challenge, knew nothing when you started, and your goal was to learn 2,500 character (perhaps to start trying to read newspapers in Chinese), you would have completed 10.4% of the learning required in only 25 days.
In short, the challenge encouraged learners to acquire more characters than we had expected, and we are extremely pleased with the results.
At the same time, we realize that now that the site is larger, we probably can’t afford to host anymore non-raffle challenges. You guys are too dedicated! Until we build some more contest infrastructure, we’ll have to scale it back to picking winners from qualified contestants.
In the future, it would be cool to have another unrestricted challenge with far more restrictive rules. Perhaps you have to practice for 20 minutes once in the morning (in your timezone) and once in the afternoon every day for 30 days. Or perhaps you would take a one-week algorithmic examination and then study at the mathematically determined optimal points in your schedule to maximize learning. Or perhaps you would have to study for 10 minutes a day at 6 hour intervals. All of those would be pretty cool, and would be really intense to keep up with. They would also probably produce even better retention and lower burnout (an hour of Skritter time is a long while to site in front of a computer every day). We have a lot on our plates before we can build anything so grandiose, but we’ve been tossing around hypothetical cool new contest-related features and think we will tie it into a larger site-wide incentives system that we’re planning to build a bit later.
Thanks to everyone that participated. We are honored at your dedication and look forward to shipping prizes to everyone.
In the coming weeks we will be posting the stories of contest winners here. Basically we asked winners how they did it, and some of the stories are pretty impressive. Keep an eye on here for those stories.
We just sent out the Skritter June Newsletter (China link), so check that out!