Designing Learning Activities for Sustained Engagement

The experience of a successful adolescent learner will be described from the student’s perspective about learning the video game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) through selected passages from a phenomenological interview. The question driving this investigation is, “Why did she sustain engagement in learning?” The importance of this question came out of the need for background on how to create an afterschool program that was to use DDR as an after school activity that might engage adolescents and tweens to become more physically active and reduce the risk of adult obesity, and to increase bone density for these developing young people through playing the game over time. The difficulty of creating this program was the risk that the students would not sustain engagement in the activity, and we would not have a viable sample for the bone density adolescent obesity study. Implications of this study include understanding the potential construction of learning environments that motivate and sustain engagement in learning and the importance of identity construction for teachers to motivate and engage their students. In addition to the analysis of sustained engagement through the four socio- and cultural-cognitive theories, four major principals were extracted from the operationalized themes into a framework for instructional design techniques and theory for engaging learners for game design, training, and in classroom learning.

Learning as Becoming

In this chapter, we share a model of game-based learning for use in the context of classroom learning in school. The model is based on the dialectic interaction between game play and dialogic engagement with peers and teacher on one hand and a developmental trajectory of competence-through-performance on the other. It is instantiated in the context of a learning program related to citizenship education using the computer game Space Station Leonis. We argue for the importance of values in all learning, based upon a theory of becoming citizens that is founded on process philosophy. We relate values to dispositions as articulated manifestations of values and describe how the Leonis learning program helps to achieve dispositional shifts befitting citizenship education in a globalized and multi-cultural world.

Using Recommendation Systems to Adapt Gameplay

Recommendation systems are key components in many Web applications (Amazon, Netflix, eHarmony). Each system gathers user input, such as the products they buy, and searches for patterns in order to determine user preferences and tastes. These preferences are then used to recommend other content that a user may enjoy. Games on the other hand are often designed with a one-size-fits-all approach not taking player preferences into account. However there is a growing interest in both the games industry and game research communities to begin incorporating systems that can adapt, or alter how the game functions, to specific players. This paper examines how Web application recommendation systems compare to current games that adapt their gameplay to specific players. The comparison shows that current games do not use recommendation methods that are data intensive or collaborative when adapting to players. Design suggestions are offered within this manuscript for how game developers can benefit from incorporating the lesser used recommendation methods.

Design Factors for Effective Science Simulations

We argue that the effectiveness of simulations for science education depends on design features such as the type of representation chosen to depict key concepts. We hypothesize that the addition of iconic representations to simulations can help novice learners interpret the visual simulation interface and improve cognitive learning outcomes as well as learners’ self-efficacy. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments with high school chemistry students. The studies examined the effects of representation type (symbolic versus iconic), prior knowledge, and spatial ability on comprehension, knowledge transfer, and self-efficacy under low cognitive load (Study 1, N=80) and high cognitive load conditions (Study 2, N=91). Results supported our hypotheses that design features such as the addition of iconic representations can help scaffold students’ comprehension of science simulations, and that this effect was strongest for learners with low prior knowledge. Adding icons also improved learners’ general self-efficacy.

Lessons Learned about Designing Augmented Realities

Utilizing GPS-enabled handheld computing units, we have developed and studied Augmented Reality (AR) curricula to help middle-school students learn literacy and math. In AR, students move around an outdoor physical environment, interacting with virtual characters and artifacts on their handheld computer. These “invisible” objects and characters provide clues to help solve a mystery, guiding the students through a process of inquiry and evidence-building. The first AR curriculum we developed, Alien Contact!, is based on a scenario where aliens have crash landed near the students’ middle school. Students, working in teams, learn math and literacy skills in the course of determining why the aliens have come to earth. This study describes the design heuristics used during the initial development and deployment of Alien Contact!, the results of two formative evaluations of this curriculum, and the impact these findings have had on revising our design heuristics for a subsequent AR curriculum about beached whales, called Gray Anatomy.

A Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World

We report results of an experiment on prices and demand in a fantasy-based virtual world. A virtual world is a persistent, synthetic, online environment that can be accessed by many users at the same time. Because most virtual worlds are built around a fantasy theme, complete with magic, monsters, and treasure, there is considerable skepticism that human behavior in such environments is in any way “normal.” Our world, “Arden,” was designed to test whether players in a typical fantasy environment were economically “normal.” Specifically, we tested whether fantasy gamers conform to the Law of Demand, which states that increasing the price of a good, all else equal, will reduce the quantity demanded. We created two exactly equivalent worlds, and randomly assigned players to one or the other. The only difference in the two worlds was that the price of a single good, a health potion, was twice as high in the experimental world than in the control. We allowed players (N = 43) to enter and play the environment for a month. We found that players in the experimental condition purchased 43.1 percent fewer of the potions, implying a demand elasticity of -0.431. This finding is well within the range one expects for normal economic agents. We take this as evidence that the Law of Demand holds in fantasy environments, which suggests in turn that fantasy gamers may well be economically normal. If so, it may be worthwhile to conduct controlled economic and social experiments in virtual worlds at greater scales of both population (thousands of users) and time (many months).

Visual Analyses of the Creation of Avatars

Video games are becoming more popular; there has been a particular rise in interest and use of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs). These games utilize avatar creation; avatars can be seen as the technological instantiation of the real person in the virtual world. Little research has been conducted on avatar creation. Although it is has been anecdotally postulated that you can be anything you want online, there is a dearth of research on what happens when participants are told to create avatars, particularly avatars within given contexts. In this study, we used the Second Life avatar creation tool to examine what would happen when participants were told to create avatars as heroes, villains, their ideal self, and their actual self. Data analyses reveal that characters often refuse to change permanent aspects of their features, instead modifying only temporal aspects. This research has provided support for the quantitative review of avatar characteristics as predictors of vignette groupings.

The Play of Persuasion Why “Serious” Isn’t the Opposite of Fun by Nicholas Fortugno Keynote Speech delivered at Meaningful Play, East Lansing, October 2008.

Game designer Nick Fortungno’s keynote speech at the Meaningful Play conference talked about the conundrum of whether serious games can or even should be fun. Fortugno looks back at historical works of popular culture that exerted transformative effects on society. He examines three current persuasive games and offers his thoughts on what it will take for a game to achieve societal transformation.

Virtual Worlds for Teaching

Immersive virtual worlds structured for education have the potential to engage students who do not respond well to traditional classroom activities. To test the appeal and usability of virtual environments in the classroom, four ninth grade science classes in a rural Upstate New York school were randomly assigned to learn an introductory genetics unit for three class periods in either an online, multi-user, virtual world computer environment or in a traditional classroom setting using lecture, worksheets, and model building. The groups were then reversed for a second three-day trial. Quizzes were given before, at midpoint, and at the end of the study. Both groups demonstrated significant knowledge gain of the genetics curriculum. This study demonstrates that self-directed learning can occur while exploring virtual world computer environments. The students were enthusiastic about using virtual worlds for education and indicated a strong preference for a variety of teaching methods, which suggests that offering mixed modalities may engage students who are otherwise uninterested in school.

Promoting Civic Thinking through Epistemic Game Play

A growing body of research suggests that computer games can help players learn to integrate knowledge and skills with values in complex domains of real-world problem solving (P. C. Adams, 1998; Barab et al., 2001; Gee, 2003; Shaffer et al., 2005; Starr, 1994). In particular, research suggests that epistemic games—games where players think and act like real world professionals—can link knowledge, skills, and values into professional ways of thinking (Shaffer, 2006). Here, we look at how a ten hour version of the epistemic game Urban Science developed civic thinking in young people as they learned about urban ecology by role-playing as urban planners redesigning a city. Specifically, we ask whether and how overcoming authentic obstacles from the profession of urban planning in the virtual world of a role playing game can link civic values with the knowledge and skills young people need to solve complex social and ecological problems. Our results from coded pre- and post-interviews show that players learned to think of cities as complex systems, learned about skills that planners use to enact change in these systems, and perhaps most important, learned the value of serving the public in that process. Two aspects of the game, tool-as-obstacle and stakeholders-as-obstacle, contributed to the development of players’ civic thinking. Thus, our results suggest that games like Urban Science may help young people—and thus help all of us—identify and address the many civic, economic, and environmental challenges in an increasingly complex, and increasingly urban, world.