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.
