Devlin 008… the largest lecture hall at Boston College and where I went twice a week for my Microeconomics class.“Alright everyone. Take out your phones. Go to the App Store and download MobLab.”
MobLab? What is that? After the first week or so, I swiftly came to learn that MobLab was going to be my new friend in navigating the concepts I was learning that semester in my econ class, as well as in the adjustment phase of adapting to lecture hall style learning.
I’ve always been someone who learns best through experience. When I put classroom concepts into action, new ideas tend to stick the best. I was pretty nervous to have a class that was in a big lecture hall because I was afraid that it would lack the experiential and interactive learning that I typically crave in a classroom environment. MobLab turned out ot be the perfect way for me to be able to live out my need for experiential learning in the confinement of a lecture hall.
For the ten-to-twenty minutes of each class that our professor used MobLab, we were forced out of our passive state of note-taking and pulled straight into an immersive and interactive space to learn. What I thought was going to be a stale lecture turned into a space where I was able to find the active engagement I needed to succeed. The competition that MobLab’s games roused in class made it easy to pick up concepts from comparative advantage to externalities, and the emotion they seemed to inspire brought everyone into the same head space needed to make the learning environment both exciting and incredibly productive.
I am happy to report that I survived my first ever large lecture class and found a new passion for economics thanks to MobLab and Professor Richardson.