Cognitive, process, and collaborative supports for ...

Cognitive, process, and collaborative supports for knowledge integration among youth games for science learning Camillia Matuk, Christopher Hovey, Talia Hurwich & Juan Pablo Sarmiento, New York University Background & objectives

•  Educational science game design offers unique opportunities for

knowledge integration (Linn & Eylon, 2011). Learners must integrate knowledge of games, science, pedagogy, and design (Khaled et al., 2014).

•  In practice, designers are teams of interdependent collaborators with

distributed expertise. This contrasts with the equal, parallel roles typical in classroom settings.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS: What opportunities and challenges for knowledge integration exist within a learning environment that supports collaborative educational science game design? How might learners develop and integrate the various kinds of expertise necessary to create successful games for science learning?

Participants & context

•  Eleven 7th grade youth from a public middle school in a large urban city in E. United States, two teachers, up to four facilitators

•  Five-day elective workshop, held at a university, on designing games to

teach about the measles virus. Games were intended to accompany the comic book Carnival of Contagion (worldofviruses.unl.edu, Hall et al, 2017).

Data & analysis

•  Data: Field notes, audio, student interviews, facilitator reflections, students’ design

iterations, surveys that probed experiences with games and comics, science interest and self-perceptions as scientists, understanding of measles.

•  Analysis: Descriptive analysis, triangulation among data sources, identification of

examples illustrative of themes related to how students integrated knowledge, and how students responded to interdependent, collaborative roles.

Findings Learning opportunities in aligning science learning actions with player actions While students could recognize poor games that misalign player and learner actions, they were challenged to embody that alignment in their own designs. One team integrated science extrinsically into their game:

•  The Weirdos added “Fun Fact” cards about measles (top image) when advised to integrate science concepts into their board game’s mechanics.

•  While the process of designing the cards involved science learning, the cards themselves were only tangential to the product of the design.

In contrast, another team integrated science intrinsically into their game:

•  The Musketeers went through several iterations of

their game’s mechanics around vaccines. By attempting to align player actions with accurate science, the team moved from a misconceived view of vaccines as curative (players vaccinated the sick to cure/remove their symptoms), to a normative view The Weirdos’ Fun Fact cards (top) and of vaccines as preventative (players used vaccines the Musketeers’ game board (bottom). to prevent various diseases).

Importance of framing team roles as areas of expertise rather than as interchangeable tasks

•  Assigning interdependent roles was variably successful, and depended on participants’ expectations and group dynamics.

From the comic book, Carnival of Contagion (copyright Bob Hall 2017)

Workshop design

•  Guided by principles for encouraging disciplinary engagement (Engle & Conant, 2002). •  Tackle complex problems: Design an educational science game •  Foster agency and accountability: through interdependent team roles: •  • 

Science Wizard, Play Engineer, Concept Artist (cf. Jiang, Shen & Smith, 2016). Scaffold toward goals: Week’s activities followed the design process, with daily deliverables. Create playful, social interactions to encourage identification with science (Clegg & Kolodner, 2013) Workshop schedule

M •  •  •  •  Tu •  •  •  W • 

•  •  Th • 

F

•  •  •  • 

Form teams. Complete pre-test. Read comic. Lesson: How to align science learning with player actions. Activity to learn best practices for brainstorming. Teams brainstorm and narrow down game ideas. Teams present initial game design ideas to the group. Team role break-outs: •  Science wizards learn to recognize qualities of effective educational games. •  Concept artists align gameplay with different kinds of narratives/ conflicts. •  Play engineers learn strategies for rapid prototyping. Teams parallel prototype two game ideas. Cross-team playtesting followed by iteration. Team role break-outs: •  Science wizards learn to critique alignment between science learning actions and player actions. •  Concept artists learn to critique the role of characters and “fun” in games. •  Play engineers learn to ask useful questions and to accept critique during playtesting. Cross-team playtesting of game prototypes, final iterations. Complete post-test Prepare for, and hold game jam at school for other peers. Conduct group interviews.

•  Within the length of a week, it was challenging

to build a culture of interdependence among learners and teachers used to school’s traditional power structures. In this example from the comic reading session (right), a teacher heavy-handedly directs students to perform distinct responsibilities according to their role.

Gregg (to Evan, a teammate): Teacher: Evan (to Gregg):

NO THERE IS NO NPC! Evan, do you even know what an NPC is? Name it. Name what NPC stands for. I just walked into this conversation and it sounds really aggressive. (…) I don’t know what NPC stands for.

Discussion & Conclusions

Teacher: Who’s the concept artist? Gregg: Me. Teacher: Write “Mr. Panum” (the scientist that discovered that measles spread via infections) or circle his name (in the comic book).

•  When, due to time constraints, we

eliminated 2 of 3 planned role break-out sessions intended to reinforce each role’s set of expertise, these came to be viewed as interchangeable tasks. Some teams successfully self-organized. For others, the lack of guidance led to confusion and bullying (left).

•  Aligning player and learner mechanics into a game that balances fun and learning can engage students in deep science learning, but is challenging. Further research might explore successful ways to guide students in making this alignment in their designs.

•  How to orchestrate interdependent roles throughout the design process requires further exploration to effectively foster students’ agency and accountability during collaboration.

•  In the context of science game design, both iterations and final designed products are valuable evidence of student’s knowledge integration. Further research might explore the scope of possible science learning in game design contexts.

References Clegg, T., & Kolodner, J. (2014). Scientizing and Cooking: Helping Middle-School Learners Develop Scientific Dispositions. Science Education, 98(1), 36–63. Engle, R. A., & Conant, F. R. (2002). Guiding principles for fostering productive disciplinary engagement: Explaining an emergent argument in a community of learners classroom. Cognition and Instruction, 20(4), 399-483. Jiang, S., Shen, J., & Smith, B. E. (2016). Integrating Science and Writing in Multimedia Science Fictions: Investigating Student Interactions in Role-taking. Singapore: International Society of the Learning Sciences. Hall, B., West, J. & Diamond, J. (2017). Carnival of Contagion. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Khaled, R., Vanden Abeele, V., Van Mechelen, M., & Vasalou, A. (2014, October). Participatory design for serious game design: truth and lies. In Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play (pp. 457-460). ACM. Linn, M. C., & Eylon, B. S. (2011). Science learning and instruction: Taking advantage of technology to promote knowledge integration. Routledge.

Significance for Knowledge Integration and Beyond. This work adds to the larger program of research on KI by asking how KI might look among interdependent collaborative learners in a subject-integrated design-based activity. Future work might explore what aspects of KI are useful in such settings, and which might need to be elaborated or adapted to best describe how to support such learning.

Knowledge Integration: Trajectories, Opportunities and Future Directions

This research was supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and The Israel Science Foundation (1716/12)