Really fun game! There's no social incentive to share with others, or hook to return to play again, though. I learned a lot about how much thing weigh though.
Advice: make the answer much more visible. First text, visually separated (bigger font, bold, line ...), green/red. Separate the explanation part into its own block of text.
As long as there's also a non-color differentiator (like a checkmark / X) I think it's fine. Just like traffic lights having different positions. The word itself is possibly enough, although on the other hand words take longer to process than shapes/colors so best to offer a shape if also offering a color.
I did about 20 questions and didn't miss one. Because most plants, animals, etc are made of water, you really just have to compare volume. I found that visualizing the order of magnitude of the volume was a pretty good strategy for estimating weight. (Water has a density of about 1000 kg/m3)
I don't know if I was just lucky but I also did a lot of them (where's a counter?) and had all of them right.
I think the game should try to pick answers that are closer to each other. Perhaps even have an inconsistent difficulty so some questions are easier than others.
It picks choices where the winner is about 10 times the weight of the loser. Very simple. Still trying to come up with something better that increases difficulty over time.
I love that you are using plain JS for this. I was the kid who unscrewed the Rubik's cube and screwed it back together because I am too dumb solve that.
What is the deal with min_mass_kg and max_mass_kg?
Thanks. Simplest thing that works. I haven't programmed in years. I just had the idea. The last game I had released was in 1991. Seriously. I check min mass of the heavier * its multiple against max mass of the lighter times its multiple.
I did about 15 questions waiting for the game to "end", not realizing it would go on forever.
IMO if the game is infinite, count how many questions I get correct in a row, and have the game end when I get one wrong. Keep track of my high score and display it somewhere on the page, so I have a baseline target to beat. That way the game is replayable and now has a metric for how well someone plays it.
I got all questions right except for the ones involving the moon... for some reason I got all those wrong. Moon is big!
TBH my HTML and CSS is so rusty. I haven't built a webpage in about a decade! I love number 2 and number 2. That's awesome, especially sending a question to a friend. Love it.
My friends and I always talk about how big a social problem scale-blindness is, so this is awesome!
Suggestions:
1. Show progress towards some fixed number of questions so you can see your score at the end so you can see how well-calibrated you are and compare with friends.
2. Add other things than weight, so people can get calibrated for other things too. Time. Probability. Money. Risk of death. Deaths (in war or from disease, e.g.). Stuff like that!
3. Have a speed mode where you have to learn to do these calculations really fast, so that you can incorporate this awareness into your day to day life and awareness of things.
4. Have a slow mode where you are trying to get everything right, so that you learn how to proceed when you really want to be sure.
5. Have a mode where nothing is within 100 or 1000 of anything else, so that you're purely focused on scale awareness and so that your ability to estimate on a 10-100 scale doesn't matter so much.
It is hard for humans to visualize in their heads the difference between 1 billion and 10 billion. Our brains weren't created to think of such massive amounts of objects. I don't think it is too big of a social problem though.
It's probably because cavemen had to carry 10 rocks at a time, 15 max. We didn't have to use such large numbers until recently in human history.
To build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
I watched that with my kids a couple of weeks ago. Definitely one of the inspirations. Also been listening to the "What If?" audiobook and Randall Monroe is never afraid to think about things like 80,000 gorillas.
1) Would be nicer if it wasn't just an endless list of question cards. Maybe have new ones sliding in on the right, with answered ones going off to the left.
2) Visually separate the question, your answer, the correct/incorrect answer and the explanation.
3) Scores! How many right, how many in a right in a row, how did your guess compare with others etc
4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.
5) Pictures? Was just thinking you could have a 2x2 grid, with number and labelled picture of object in a colum, then you click on whether you think column 1 or 2 is the heaviest.
6) Stats - maybe on landing page or as commentary on your selections
"Did you know the weight of the Blue-whale has the most over-estimated mass"
7) Difficulty curve (or setting), feels a bit odd after you'd put some estimate into guestimating to just be asked "does a gorilla weigh more than 5 tins of beans?" Or maybe it just currently feels too-random. I might get 20 in a row, but I can't compare myself to somebody else who got another 20 in a row right.
8) "Is greater than" is nice, but simple <,> choice makes it too simple some times.
Maybe, "Which is closest to?" - which would give you multiple options to choose from.
> 4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.
But please don't decide that you need to shove a popup in my face repeatedly to persuade me to do so. I don't have "socials" and have no intention of sharing anything. Being obnoxious about it is a "Dick Move" imo
9) Coloured success/failure feedback, even just the words correct or wrong being coloured, it takes me a few moments to pick the result ouf of the new text being shown to me. This is why my bash scripts usually colour the output too.
Yeah..... um, so I picked min max ranges which would accomodate 50-90% of something. The human one is probably a bit narrow. It was a manic day of googling. Trying to work out what one molecule of caffeine weighs nearly broke me.
Aww man, I'm going to have to watch that again tonight. True story: in one of my tech jobs me and my boss had a game to try to get Monty Python quotes into meetings. In a client meeting I talked about search engine behaviour and how you don't want the search engine to just return any old results like "I found this spoon" (Life Of Brian). My boss nearly fainted trying not to laugh. Nobody else got it.
I have a suggestion: the huge numbers are not quite readable. Maybe add the scientific notation as well.
Comparing 73,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 with 844,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is tricky, especially since the numbers are not right aligned.
Adding a 73.4×10^21 vs 844×10^21 would be helpful.
Yeah. A friend was playing with a group in a room and one of them was trying to read out the questions. Not a problem with 800 gorillas but it is with bigger numbers. Hmm, not sure what to do. The Greek prefixes I find really hard to remember! For simplicity and debugging it was easiest to just slap the numbers up.
OP here. Thanks! Will be testing with my 6 year old later. He actually hasn't seen it yet. Yeah, I agree. I wanted something that everyone can read and where the physical size of the number on the screen gives a great idea of the size (in terms of order of magnitude). Alignment is a great idea. I'll have a think about that one.
I got most everything right until it asked about the moon compared to some huge number of elephants and again with tyranosaurus rexes. I picked moon both times and was wrong. I felt like those are mathematics questions that don't test your sense of scale as much as the rest because there's just no real-life experience.
That was wonderfully silly. But some comparators are vague, like "a can" or "a teabag" (used vs unused is a lot of weight difference). But making things more specific could detract from the silliness.
Another comment about the joke: I think in English the standard joke is "What's heavier, a ton of bricks or a ton of feathers?" but here in Argentina the standard joke is "¿Qué pesa mas un kilo de plumas o un kilo de plomo" ("What's heavier, a kilogram of feathers or a kilogram of plumber?".
Weird you should say that. The idea came to me after a long conversion with my 6 year old. He was telling me about a friend of his who said he was god or a god and we talked about how you could test to see if he was. That seemed to trigger off a whole synaptic storm.
It was really fun, but maybe throw a few combos closer in weight in? I played for maybe 5 minutes and didn't get any wrong. I would have played longer if I got some wrong.
149 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadA real stumper there, gotta check my math on baked bean can sizes!
Also: 700,000,000 peas weighs more than a tyrannosaurus rex?! I need to re-evaluate my perception of the weight of a pea.
I think the game should try to pick answers that are closer to each other. Perhaps even have an inconsistent difficulty so some questions are easier than others.
What is the deal with min_mass_kg and max_mass_kg?
IMO if the game is infinite, count how many questions I get correct in a row, and have the game end when I get one wrong. Keep track of my high score and display it somewhere on the page, so I have a baseline target to beat. That way the game is replayable and now has a metric for how well someone plays it.
I got all questions right except for the ones involving the moon... for some reason I got all those wrong. Moon is big!
1. Spruce up the design to make seeing the answer more of a "fun" experience
2. Button to share an answer on social media
2. Button to send a question to a friend
Suggestions:
1. Show progress towards some fixed number of questions so you can see your score at the end so you can see how well-calibrated you are and compare with friends.
2. Add other things than weight, so people can get calibrated for other things too. Time. Probability. Money. Risk of death. Deaths (in war or from disease, e.g.). Stuff like that!
3. Have a speed mode where you have to learn to do these calculations really fast, so that you can incorporate this awareness into your day to day life and awareness of things. 4. Have a slow mode where you are trying to get everything right, so that you learn how to proceed when you really want to be sure.
5. Have a mode where nothing is within 100 or 1000 of anything else, so that you're purely focused on scale awareness and so that your ability to estimate on a 10-100 scale doesn't matter so much.
It's probably because cavemen had to carry 10 rocks at a time, 15 max. We didn't have to use such large numbers until recently in human history.
Beyond 4, we need to sum the items consciously.
Beyond 10 (or so), the error rate on quick quantity calculations is exploding. The brain is just falling back on approximation mode.
Few (hopefully helpful) bits of feedback:
1) Would be nicer if it wasn't just an endless list of question cards. Maybe have new ones sliding in on the right, with answered ones going off to the left.
2) Visually separate the question, your answer, the correct/incorrect answer and the explanation.
3) Scores! How many right, how many in a right in a row, how did your guess compare with others etc
4) Social Interaction. Let me share my "best run in 60 seconds" and then let others see if they can beat me.
5) Pictures? Was just thinking you could have a 2x2 grid, with number and labelled picture of object in a colum, then you click on whether you think column 1 or 2 is the heaviest.
6) Stats - maybe on landing page or as commentary on your selections "Did you know the weight of the Blue-whale has the most over-estimated mass"
7) Difficulty curve (or setting), feels a bit odd after you'd put some estimate into guestimating to just be asked "does a gorilla weigh more than 5 tins of beans?" Or maybe it just currently feels too-random. I might get 20 in a row, but I can't compare myself to somebody else who got another 20 in a row right.
8) "Is greater than" is nice, but simple <,> choice makes it too simple some times. Maybe, "Which is closest to?" - which would give you multiple options to choose from.
But please don't decide that you need to shove a popup in my face repeatedly to persuade me to do so. I don't have "socials" and have no intention of sharing anything. Being obnoxious about it is a "Dick Move" imo
IDK if it would need a cookie, just some JS variable to store right, wrong and to calculate your average percentage?
Except maybe to make the words Correct and Wrong have colour so you don't have to read it every time. :]
https://youtube.com/watch?v=X2xlQaimsGg
I have a suggestion: the huge numbers are not quite readable. Maybe add the scientific notation as well. Comparing 73,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 with 844,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 is tricky, especially since the numbers are not right aligned.
Adding a 73.4×10^21 vs 844×10^21 would be helpful.
Of course you might have the issue of short scale vs. long scale billions but a footnote should solve that.
IMHO it could lose some of the silly charm with scientific notation.
But having the numbers aligned for easy comparison would be great.
---
To OP: I really like this! Will be guessing some with my kids who are around 10 year old. Combined weight less than an elephant.
I got most everything right until it asked about the moon compared to some huge number of elephants and again with tyranosaurus rexes. I picked moon both times and was wrong. I felt like those are mathematics questions that don't test your sense of scale as much as the rest because there's just no real-life experience.
https://weighoff.net/data.js
This option was strange, because all other options don't compare concrete weigh but weight of objects.
Nitpicking: I use 1 ton = 1000 Kg, but world wide it's more complicated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uH0hikcwjIA