Short Talk Panel RML: Concepts: Math & Science Games

Title: Playful Family Mathematics Learning Design

Type: individual-paper

Organizer: Osvaldo Jimenez

Participants: Osvaldo Jimenez, Shelley Goldman, Ben Hedrick, Roy Pea, Kristen Pilner Blair, Daniel Steinback

Often web-based communities of practice and playful learning are designed for users with similar age demographics. But with mobile technologies becoming pervasive, we believe the family unit has tremendous promise as a design focus for playful learning communities.  The family is an exciting unit for playful learning community because it is intergenerational, sometimes co-located yet also distributed, and already has strong social bonds connecting its members.  In the Family Math Project we have pursued a process of “Reciprocal Research Design & Development” (WMUTE, 2010), where we not only use basic research to feed our design process, but employ research results from observations of our pilot products in use to guide a new cycle of iterative design, as well as fueling new directions for basic research.  We will present design rationale, a demo, and review outcomes of our work with GoRoadTrip — which aims to mathematize the experience of taking a car road trip, by having mobile phone-based math games and activities that families can do together during such trips.  We will present a synthesis of what we’ve learned about how families encounter math in their daily lives, share our design research process, and explain how our mobile math designs embody innovative learning practices within the family and support how they learn socially. We will show how families coming together to learn with and from each other based on a mobile web product is novel as well as informative for providing insights on playful STEM learning at a variety of levels.

Title: Foldit Practice: Science or Gaming?

Type: individual-paper

Organizer: Theresa Horstman, Mark Chen

Participants: Theresa Horstman, Mark Chen

Each time Foldit (http://fold.it) makes the news, a question that is often asked by science educators is whether players are learning any of the science behind the game. Do players learn the biochemistry of protein structures and the principles behind efficient folds? Another question to ask, however, is whether players are engaging in scientific practice even while being disengaged from the scientific principles, bringing into question what it means to be doing science.

In analysis of the in-game and out-of-game discourse of Foldit players, we believe that the practice of playing occupies a hybrid space between scientific practice and gaming practice and that these two strands cannot be disentangled. Practice, whether classified as science or gaming, exists in contexts such that the the work involved can be described as a mangle of constraints and participant workarounds. The classification is imposed by us onto the activity to help us make sense of the world, but it would be the same regardless of label.

Still, the short answer to the science educators’ question is, yes, some Foldit players are learning the science behind the game. The long answer--what we’ll cover in this presentation--is that many players learn, talk, and do science as part and parcel to learning, talking, and playing. The puzzle game is understood through science, just as the science is understood through playing. Foldit playing experience is not monolithic, however. Not all players engage the same way, and we will also cover a range of player experiences.

Title: Motion, Meaning, and Math

Type: individual-paper

Organizers: Greg Niemeyer, Jan Hua

Participants: Eric Kaltman, Jan Hua

Discussant: Greg Niemeyer

 In the effort to innovate alternative technologies to facilitate mathematical reasoning in children (avg. age 11.85 yrs), we investigated the impact of a video game involving inverse spatial relations on the players’ abilities to reason about constant ratios. Participants were divided into a control group (n=8) and an experimental group (n=11). Both groups took part in a pre-trial Balance Scale Test to determine their ability to reason about constant ratios. The experimental group then played the Rulemaker game in three sessions, spaced one week apart. The game asked players in the experimental group to develop increasingly quantitative strategies for solving inverse proportionality problems. The control group played "Tangrams" during each of the three game-playing sessions. After the third play session, we conducted a Balance Scale Test. We found that 9 out of 9 experimental participants (who were not already using formal operations) showed qualitative shifts in reasoning about inverse proportions between weights and distances. None of the 8 control participants displayed such a shifts in reasoning about inverse proportions. We conclude that these shifts in reasoning are correlated to the manipulation of game assets. Players were able to transfer these shifts in reasoning from one experiential framework (area) to another (weight). We speculate that subjects developed reasoning about constant ratios effectively because the game initially provides tangible, embodied activities that lead to more abstract activities involving proportions. Future work will involve functional neuro-imaging to track such sequences and document longitudinal changes in proportional reasoning at the neural level.

Title: Beetles, Beasties, and Bunnies: Ubiquitous Games for Biology?

Types: individual-paper

Ogranizer: Louisa Rosenback

Participants: Judy Perry, Louisa Rosenback

Over the past two years, MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education Program has been conducting a research study around the UbiqBio project, a suite of mobile biology games that promote deep learning and strong engagement for 9th and 10th grade biology students, funded through an NIH grant. As part of the Ubiquitous Games genre, these casual games are designed for the mobile screen but playable in any web browser. Each game’s content is tied to curriculum and standards, but is designed to be played primarily outside of the classroom. Games are generally played in short, frequent bursts of time making anytime, anywhere learning accessible to students via mobile devices. Through their gameplay, students gain authentic experience with the topic and teachers reference that gameplay to tie students’ experiences back to classroom teaching.

One of the main goals of this project is to utilize media that youth already use – mobile phones and casual games – and design the experiences in such a way that students can fit learning into their lives in a way that feels natural and fun. To research this, during our study students borrowed smartphones to access and play each game as teachers taught the corresponding unit in the curriculum. Using various methods, we collected data pertaining to appeal and engagement, students’ play patterns, content knowledge gains, and students’ attitudes toward biology. Analysis of this data has given us insight into the effectiveness of these games in particular, as well as the feasibility of UbiqGames as a genre.