EDC/CCT recognizes that the only way to create educational games that are both compelling for students and useful for teachers is to involve teachers and students in the game development. So as we develop the Possible Worlds game modules, we are using a formative research process in which our team works closely with teachers and students in after-school programs to determine whether the game activities and narratives we design are both engaging and educationally substantive. This formative research will also help us understand what we will need to include in the teacher professional development and support materials for teachers to be able to implement these games into classroom instruction.
Our Research Questions
The six key research questions we want to answer through our formative work in the after-school programs with teachers and students are the following:
- Are the Possible Worlds modules engaging to students? If not, how can we make them more engaging?
- Do students who play the Possible Worlds modules understand the key science concepts addressed in the modules?
- Do the Possible Worlds modules help students that teachers identify as “struggling readers” engage in the science content as fully as students who read at grade level?
- How can the Possible Worlds modules be integrated effectively into existing 7th grade science curricula?
- What support materials do teachers need to use the Possible Worlds modules effectively?
- What professional development do teachers need to use the Possible Worlds modules effectively?
In order to answer these questions, the EDC/CCT team will work with teachers and students in school-based after-school programs in the fall of 2009 and spring of 2010 to refine Possible Worlds Module 1. The formative research on the game prototypes will take place in four schools, three in New York City and one in a suburban town in New Jersey. The research team will be working with one middle school science teacher and five to ten students at each school. The teachers and students will test out, providing feedback on whether the mini-games are appealing, whether students actually learn the concepts addressed, and how the games could be integrated into classroom environments.
After a Spring that saw the Possible Worlds team participate in four conferences, we are gearing up for a very exciting fall and winter.
On September 1st, 2009, we will be in the UK at Brunel University in West London for the DiGRA 2009 Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory, where Alice Anderson will be presenting a paper on analyzing video game play using microgenetic research methods. Microgenetic methods are defined by conducting a high density of observations during a period of rapid change that ultimately levels off to a new stable skill. Using the footage we have from students playing World of Goo, Auditorium and Crayon Physics, the research team has begun analyzing their game play in this way to examine the development of strategy and problem solving skills. The paper describes our methods for coding and analyzing game play, and how it relates to other studies of thinking skills that use microgenetic methods.
Then, on December 3, we will be at the 59th National Reading Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where our resident literacy advisor, Naomi Hupert, will be presenting a paper on Supporting Middle Grade Science Literacy Using Gaming Technology. Naomi’s presentation will discuss how qualitative data collected from teachers and classrooms has been used to inform the development of our mini games, which are designed to support concept development, critical thinking, categorization, and awareness of vocabulary and multiple meanings of words that are used in science contexts.
How do children draw on their capacity for scientific reasoning to solve problems they encounter in video games? It’s a key question that we need to consider when working through ideas for game modules that encourage scientific thinking. To help us understand this question, we set up a series of afterschool gaming sessions over a 13-week period beginning in January 2009 and ending in May 2009, where we could observe how young people think through game challenges. The research team worked with 20 4th-7th grade boys and girls in two afterschool programs in New York City. We used Deanna Kuhn’s conceptual model for “strategic competence in inquiry” as our theoretical framework, developing “think aloud” protocols to use during our observations. These protocols were designed to help children verbalize their thinking about the problems they perceive in games, the cues they identify in order to overcome obstacles, and the decisions they make in order to solve those problems.
We took these protocols into the field using four commercial video games: The World of Goo, Auditorium, Crayon Physics, and Portal. We chose these games for three reasons:
- They are manageable in terms of children’s time and efforts
- The problems children encounter in these games are well defined and based on physics principles
- They have a slow pace that facilitates frequent pausing, enabling participants to think aloud as they play and describe their actions.
For further analysis and coding, each game play session was recorded with a Video FlipCam. As students played, researchers asked frequent questions to probe their decision making and reasoning, such as: “What do you think you have to do here? How do you know? Tell me more about what just happened.”
We are now examining the students’ varying theories and strategies in each game to see how the feedback that the games provide influences revision of strategy. By looking at students’ thought processes as they are happening in the game, we hope to understand how learning is refined, re-conceptualized and incorporated into existing knowledge.
This effort is part of an ongoing focus in our work to understand how developmental and cognitive differences shape children’s engagement with games, with an eye toward developing educational games that support children’s development as problem solvers.
