Recent posts for Games
AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
Goal. This Full Research and Development Project will address the STEM Challenge: “How can all students be assured the opportunity to learn significant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) content?” This project will develop a system for producing automated professional mentoring, as a critical piece of technological infrastructure for a new, more motivating, and more inclusive approach to STEM education a decade or more in the future, where students are motivated to learn STEM concepts because they play computer games based on STEM professions.
Technology. The project will add two important components to prior work on NSF-funded STEM computer games. We will develop automated mentoring technology, AutoMentor, building on previous research on automated tutoring systems (specifically on AutoTutor, a computer tutor that helps students learn about science and technology topics by holding a conversation in natural language with the learner) and Evidence Centered Assessment Design (specifically, Epistemic Network Analysis, a methodology developed with NSF funding to assess students’ ability to think and act like STEM professionals through
game play).
Hypothesis. In so doing, the project explores a specific hypothesis about STEM mentoring: A sociocultural model as the basis of an automated tutoring system can provide a computational model of participation in a community of practice, which will produce effective professional feedback from nonplayer-characters in a STEM learning game.
Method. The project will use a Wizard of Oz methodology, in which data will be collected about player/mentor interactions over multiple instances of game play, and the resulting database used to develop and validate a system for automatically coding interactions. The coded database will then be used to generate automated responses to player actions in the game, and the resulting system will be tested to see whether players’ STEM learning with automated mentoring are comparable to outcomes with live mentors.
Team. The project team includes leading researchers in intelligent tutoring systems (Graesser),
assessment (Mislevy), and game-based learning (Shaffer). The team also includes a computer scientist (Gleicher), STEM content expert (Asligul Gocmen, Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning,
University of Wisconsin-Madison), measurement expert (Andre A. Rupp, Assistant Professor of Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation, University of Maryland) and a collaborating institution with expertise in STEM educational programming (Massachusetts Audubon Society). The combination of these areas of expertise is, we believe, unique and novel, and has the potential to transform work in each of the core areas of the proposal: intelligent tutoring, assessment, and game-based learning.
Intellectual Merit
The development of AutoMentor will represent a significant contribution to our knowledge about game-based learning and the science of learning more generally. The development of a computational
model of participation in a community of practice will provide an important link between traditional cognitive science and situated views of learning. It will also potentially contribute to research in artificial intelligence and intelligent agents.
Broader impact
This work will provide a powerful technology for incorporating professional STEM expertise in STEM education activities. The project enhances the infrastructure for joint research by forming a collaborative partnership among three research institutions (the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Maryland, and the University of Memphis) and an educational delivery organization (The
Massachusetts Audubon Society). Results will be disseminated through scientific papers and conferences, but also through the work of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. The game incorporating AutoMentor will be available for use by schools and non-profit organizations.
A glimpse of what’s hidden
A few days ago I was meeting with a teacher who ran Urban Science in her classroom last year. We were sitting in her classroom after school, and talking about plans for her to run another version of the game this spring. We were excited because many of the same students from last year are in her class again and we thought it would be interesting to see how they played the game for the second time. Also, the site that the students would be researching and rezoning in the game was actually the neighborhood where the school is located and where most of the students live.
While we were talking, one of her students walked into the room. The teacher enthusiastically told her that the class would be playing Urban Science again this spring. The student looked at us and wordlessly unzipped her coat to reveal the Epistemic Games t-shirt that all of the players got the previous year.
While I don’t want to go too far in interpreting the synchronicity of this encounter, I couldn’t help but think that 5th graders do not make sartorial choices lightly. It can sometimes be hard to know the inner transformations that happen as kids are learning and growing. But every once in a while, if you are lucky, you can get an unzipped glimpse of what kids take with them.
Urban Science game teaches children how to think like urban planners
This video describes the epistemic game Urban Science, which simulates elements of the urban planning process to teach middle school and high school students how to think like urban planners. It was was produced to give educators a view into what playing urban science is like. The video includes footage of middle school students playing and talking about a version of Urban Science that ran in 2007, and also interview footage with a teacher from Lakeview Elementary in Madison, Susan Hobart, who ran a version of the game in the spring of 2009 in her classroom.
A Virtual Hemodialyzer Design Project for First-Year Engineers
Chesler, N.C. Bagley, E., Breckenfeld, E., West, D. and Shaffer, D.W. (2010). A Virtual hemodialyzer design project for first-year engineers: An epistemic game approach. Proceedings of the ASME 2010 Summer Bioengineering Conference. Naples, FL, .
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/EF-Games-for-SBC-FINAL.pdf
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UW-Madison Journalism student writes about Epistemic Games
Epistemic games rely on the analysis of the authentic practices of professional practica to inform their design. Here is a case where a student engaged in the authentic practices of a Journalism practicum at University of Wisconsin-Madison, includes news about epistemic games in the content created through those practices…
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.
