Games and Learning Research Going to Scale with New Federal Dollars

Posted by Sarah J. • November 6, 2009

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison will develop technology to allow computers to teach complex real-world problem solving, thanks to a large grant from the National Science Foundation..

The work builds on successes students have had playing the computer game “Urban Science,” whose development was supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

In the game, middle- and high-school students learn about mathematics, science and technology by working as urban planners. Watch principal investigator David Williamson Shaffer and students discuss their experiences playing Urban Science here.

For more details on the planned work, read University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Elizabeth Bagley’s blog post on virtual mentoring and assessment.

Computer Games in Education

Oct. 22, 2009

by Emily Mawer

A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison will study computer games and learning with federal research grants.

The principal investigator on several of the grants, David Williamson Shaffer, a professor of educational psychology at UW-Madison, said computers games allow students to live in a simulated world where they can face real life problems.

“What computer games do is give young people an opportunity to prepare for the kind of innovative and creative real world problem solving that they need to deal with in a global economy,” Shaffer said.

The largest grant, from the National Science Foundation, is devoted to research surrounding the Urban Science computer game, previously created at UW-Madison.  In the game, middle school and high school students become urban planners and solve problems that planners typically face, including going on site visits, talking to stake holders and using feedback to create a design proposal.  The research will focus on creating mentors for the game to coach students through their questions.

Shaffer explained that students studying to be urban planners are given the opportunity to try out parts of the planning process and then talk about their work with mentors.

“It is those conversations that turn the action that they are doing into understanding about the way the profession works,” Shaffer said.  “So in the game we recreated that.”

As the game currently exists, students can seek help from adult mentors through online chats.  Shaffer’s team, in partnership with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, will collect a database of commonly asked questions and answers.  Then they will analyze the information and create a system within the game that can respond appropriately to students.

Shaffer hopes that this part of the research will be applicable beyond this one game.

“The real payoff is in being able to use this same approach to make high quality professional mentoring available in all kinds of fields and all kinds of games,” Shaffer said.

The Urban Science research will take place over the next five years, with the first trials over the winter.

In addition to the Urban Science project, research grants are funding the creation of a computer game to make the engineering school at the University more diverse.

Shaffer is working with Naomi Chesler, an associate professor in the School of Engineering, to create a game that will increase retention in the engineering school, especially retention of woman and minorities.

“The idea is that a diverse workforce makes it possible to communicate with other countries and other places more effectively, because you have people from a variety of backgrounds,” Shaffer said.  “It brings other ideas and other perspectives.”

In the game, Nephrotex, engineering students will build a component of a dialysis machine using nanotechnology.  Shaffer said the idea is to give students a realistic experience of engineering design and to allow them to follow the process from beginning to end.

“Learning to become engineers is not just about math and science, but also about learning to see the world through a certain viewpoint,” Chesler said.

It is the math and science coursework that may cause so many students to decide against an engineering major, according to Shaffer.

”It is this kind of humanistic perspective on engineering that is often missing from the early parts of the curriculum,” Shaffer said.  “So, you get people who want to solve problems for other people, instead they end up solving a bunch of math equations and they get discouraged and drop out.”

The Nephrotex game will provide the kind of real world experience students need to stay motivated in their other courses, Shaffer said.

Nephrotex will be ready within the next two years, according to Chesler.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/hatfield-ICLS2010-review.pdf

As bloggers and mobile phone eye-witnesses increasingly supplement the ‘news,’ it is more important than ever to understand how professional journalists develop their expertise. In this paper, we examine an intermediate level reporting practicum course to explore the learning processes therein. Using a new method called Epistemic Network Analysis, we also explore emergent relationships within developing journalistic expertise. Understanding these relationships should be useful for journalism education as well as the design of research on learning environments.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/Bagley-ICLS2010-submitted.doc

Preparing citizens to address the complex problems inherent in cities requires our changing society to embrace a new kind of education. One way to train people to think about complex problems is to identify and study how professionals who think in those ways develop their epistemic frame. In this paper, we examine one of the ways urban planners master and appropriate relevant expertise through an ethnographic study of an urban planning practicum. Specifically, we use a new method called epistemic network analysis to look at presentation feedback sessions during two weeks of the practicum to explore emergent relationships between the teacher’s planning expertise and the students’ expertise. The results of this study indicate that epistemic network analysis offers a technique for analyzing the kinds of situated understanding that result from sociocultural learning and for observing the translation of pedagogy into practice in various types of learning environments.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/ICLS2010_pnash_submission_final.pdf

Players of epistemic games–computer games that simulate professional practica—have been shown to develop epistemic frames: a profession’s particular way of seeing and solving problems. This study examines the interactions between players and mentors in one epistemic game, Urban Science. Using a new method called epistemic network analysis, we explore how players develop epistemic frames through playing the game. Our results show that players imitate and internalize the professional way of thinking that the mentors model, suggesting that mentors can effectively model epistemic frames, and that epistemic network analysis is a useful way to chart the development of learning through mentoring relationships.

My other best piece of generic piece of application advice is:

No matter where someone is thinking about applying, it is a good idea to get in touch with the current graduate students of professors they are interested in working with. You get a much better sense of the program that way, and can (if nothing else) target your application essay better.

What prompted this post, though, was a realization I had as I’ve been talking with prospective applicants this fall. With all the new projects we’ve started up, our work is getting more and more technical and mathematical.

I don’t think that’s really a good thing or a bad thing, just a consequence of moving to work at larger scales. But perhaps a shift worth noting.

I thought I’d share a some of those thoughts for those who might be interested….

::

I am proud of the fact that that students say my classes are challenging and often transformative for their thinking. My work as a teacher goes in to orchestrating activities, contexts, and classroom practices that help a class navigate the difficult challenge of exploring ideas in a way that gives authentic voice to their own insights and opinions while simultaneously taking them toward a deeper understanding of the central issues of the material.

The central organizing metaphor I use for this is the idea that a course is a narrative: that the rules of good storytelling apply to the course as a whole, to individual classes and assignments, and to the moment-by-moment unfolding of ideas. A syllabus represents the unfolding of a story arc: ideas are foreshadowed, explored, and connected; dramatic tension is created and resolved; conflict between theories, authors, and traditions are introduced and played out. The result, when it works well, is a course in which students develop a framework for thinking about a topic or field that is authentically their own but respects the traditions and norms of the field they are studying.

Along the way, there is much discussion of epistemology: claims being made, evidence that supports them, and forms of argumentation that link the two. I use a model for final projects in my classes in which students prepare a paper and present it to the class, and then revise their work based on extensive feedback from their peers and me. The result is an opportunity for the development of their writing skills and personal intellectual growth.

New material concerning nanotechnology and the societal implications thereof will be introduced into several pre-existing courses, and two new courses will be created dedicated solely to them. The Epistemic Games Group will work with co-investigators in the College of Engineering to develop the game Nephrotex: The Dialysis Redesign Project, which will be a core component of one of the new nanotechnology courses.

The Principal Investigator and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. Wendy Crone, Dr. Naomi Chesler, Dr. Kristyn Masters, Dr. David Shaffer, and Dr. Kevin Turner.  The grant, for $199,961, will begin on January 1, 2010 through the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Education and Centers Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education unit.  The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.

Epistemic Games Group has received funding to help us bring the experience and skills we’ve gained from our previous games to the undergraduate environment as we develop a new game for engineering students. Nephrotex: The Dialysis Redesign Project will provide a dialysis simulation based on authentic engineering practices. This game will be incorporated into an engineering undergraduate course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, allowing us to determine how well these students learn through playing the game, as opposed to through a more traditional textbook-based environment.

One advantage of a professional practice-based game is that it introduces skills and techniques not discussed in gatekeeper math and science courses. This should help convince students who otherwise would have been discouraged that they too can be engineers, and thus help to increase the diversity of the field.

The game will help to create learning materials, teaching techniques, and faculty experience. It will also make contributions to the knowledge about engineering education by conducting a robust evaluation of current theories of professional learning in a novel context. Once complete, the game will be shared with engineering institutions nation-wide, enabling faculty at a variety of institutions to adapt and customize it for their own use and research.

The Principal Investigator and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. David Shaffer and Dr. Naomi Chesler.  The grant, for $499,993, was awarded September 1, 2009 through the National Science Foundation’s Division of Undergraduate Education – Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement Stage 2 project.  The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.

ENA is a new conceptual and statistical approach to STEM learning, and a potentially revolutionary one. While developed in the context of epistemic games, ENA is an approach which can be used in any complex STEM situation where the connections between things learned are more important than the isolated pieces themselves.

The PI and Co-PI on this grant are Dr. David Shaffer and Dr. André Rupp.  The grant, for $300,000, will begin on January 1, 2010 through the National Science Foundation’s Division on Research in Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL).  The summary of the grant proposal can be viewed here.