What can educators learn from unboxing videos?

The viral phenomena of unboxing videos

In 2014, CNN ran an article on the “bizarre, lucrative world of 'unboxing' videos” which reported that an unboxing video showing the toys inside Disney-themed Kinder Eggs has attracted more than 35 million views since it was uploaded to YouTube on Oct 17, 2012. This is corroborated by Think with Google, which revealed that as at June 2017, the amount of time people have spent watching unboxing videos just on their phones is the equivalent of watching the holiday classic "Love Actually" more than 20 million times.

On all counts, unboxing videos look like they are here to stay. Unboxing videos have become part of the marketeers’ toolkit as consumers grow weary of repetitive influencer posts. On December 3, 2018, Forbes reported that the highest paid YouTuber is a 7-year old boy named Ryan who reportedly earned an estimated $22 million from unboxing videos. However, we should not mistake unboxing video to be a new genre. One of the earliest unboxing videos - the unboxing of the Nokia E61 mobile phone - was filmed in 2006. Google Trends also show that the term “unboxing” began to garner interest in late 2006. Interestingly, the first unboxing video was made in 1978, way before unboxing videos came to public eye.

That said, I must confess that I just watched my first unboxing video last month, after hearing of this genre for the first time from a colleague. And that experience blew my mind away. I could not believe that I was thoroughly gripped by the video, which did not have an obvious storyline or cast, and I was fully immersed for a good 3 minutes before I stopped watching. This was 6 times more than my usual attention span when it comes to YouTube video. My experience tells me that there is something magical and emotional about unboxing videos, which made me think if we could replicate this emotional engagement for learning purposes.

Psychology Today offered 7 reasons for their appeal, including emotional connection, resemblance to taking a trip, relational attachment and biological reward. In the following paragraphs, I seek to discuss how educators can also forge an emotional connection with students through effective design of educational media and make learning feel like taking a trip through design of suitable learning scaffolds and experiences.

Make an emotional connection

Unboxing draws upon an experience that most children can identify with, that of receiving a new toy. This increases the chance of identification as children relate to the excitement of opening a new toy, which enables them to step into the shoes of the un-boxer and experiences the same emotional journey as the unboxing unfolds. Anticipation and curiosity keeps the viewer on the edge of their seats and they wait to see what the step brings and brace themselves for the next surprise. If only the same children were this immersed and engaged when watching educational videos.

The emotional experience of children during the learning process is often neglected in learning design and educational media design. This could largely be because the job to be done is hard enough without putting emotions on the equation as designers grapple with curriculum, pedagogical and technological considerations. However, when we do not attend to children’s emotional needs, we also offer them no reason to pay attention to the content that we deem important for them to learn. This, I learnt from Andrew Stanton’s Ted Talk in 2012 on “The Clues to a Great Story” where he puts forth the greatest story commandment, “make me care.” And there are different ways to bring this message across.

In a YouTube video “Motion in a Straight Line: Crash Course Physics #1” produced by the Vlog brothers, we saw the presenter speaking directly to the viewers and explaining why this subject matters - to contest speeding tickets - before launching into the topic. This preamble helped to make the content personally meaningful, and in some way, gave rise to identification and emotional connection with the topic. In 'Pigby's Tales', a gamified interactive learning experience, viewers walked in the shoes of Buzz who needed to earn enough money to buy a new skateboard for an upcoming competition. In this instance, young viewers identify with Buzz, who needed to save up to buy an item that they badly desire. These examples illustrate two rather different ways of forging an emotional connection, but both toward the same goal of helping students learn.

Make it feels like taking a trip

Unboxing videos are in essence unfolding narratives, which make viewers feel like they were on a journey to somewhere, giving rise to a sense of involvement and shared experience. In these instances, viewers turn from being passive viewers to becoming active participants, even though they appear to be not doing anything. This is narrative transportation, the sense of being in a story, and being part of the story. In unboxing videos, this sense of participation and presence (in the story) is amplified through camera techniques such as first-person point-of view and close-up shots. And we know that, when we are immersed in an experience, we are more receptive to the content presented and more willing to suspend disbelief..

How then might we make learning feel like taking a trip? The truth of the matter is, learning is a journey to knowledge and mastery, though it often does not feel so. This could be due to how learning has been compartmentalised through standardised curriculums, common class schedules and the topical approach to learning. While these mechanisms are useful in bringing coherence and discipline to the learning process, it can also create confusion as students move from subject to subject, topic to topic, without seeing the connections between these seemingly standalone knowledge pieces. In response, at the school and departmental level, newer learning approaches such as applied learning and multidisciplinary project work have begun to find their ways to schools and classrooms.

From the teacher’s point of view, as the person who is on this learning journey with students, the challenge to help them with sense-making remains. Prof Manu Kapur and Dr Katherine Bielaczyc reported in the journal article “Designing for Productive Failure” that students who collaboratively solved complex problems before attending a teacher-led consolidation generated a diversity of linked representations and methods for solving these problems, even though their problem-solving efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Students who had undergone this intervention also significantly outperformed students who received direct instruction on well-structured and complex problems on the post-test. At the heart of this attempt to harness the power of productive struggle is task design, designing learning activities that encourage creativity and build authentic engagement and perseverance.

Self-directed learning tasks mediate the learning experience by taking students on a journey in which they are active agents navigating the murky waters of mastering new concepts. And to design an effective learning task requires that we consider learning sequences, i.e. what should come before so that the students can do X, and learning transitions, i.e. how can we help to activate what students already know, that can bridge the new knowledge acquired. It also compels us to invest time and effort in crafting instructions to direct students’ attention and hint at the next steps without directly telling them what to do, thus allowing what they need to learn to unfold through their efforts and experiences.

At the end of the day, an effective learning experience should feel like that of viewing an unboxing video, to be emotionally engaged and cognitively stimulated, where one is fully immersed in the moment. To achieve this, we need to make the effort to design sound learning experiences and the enabling educational media.