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.

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.

Federal grants power research on computer games and learning

Sept. 29, 2009

by Dennis Chaptman

A research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently won $4.5 million in federal grants to study computer games and learning.

"Funding at this scale gives us an unprecedented opportunity to use computer games to teach — and to test what kids have learned — in a new way," says David Williamson Shaffer, a professor of educational psychology in the UW-Madison School of Education who is principal investigator on three of the four grants. "This funding lets us use the power of computer technology to prepare kids for the world of global competition that computer technology has created."

The largest of the National Science Foundation grants — for $3.5 million — creates a research consortium of three universities to develop technology that will let computers teach real-world problem-solving.

The team will use the educational computer game "Urban Science," which was developed at UW-Madison with previous funding from the National Science Foundation and the Macarthur Foundation.

In the game, middle- and high-school students learn about mathematics, science and technology by working as urban planners. Guided by adult mentors as part of a fictitious urban planning firm, they develop real plans for sustainable land use.

In partnership with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, students across Massachusetts will have an opportunity to play "Urban Science," and the researchers will collect data on what the students and adult mentors do in the game.

The research team will use this data to create computer-generated, artificially intelligent characters in game to coach students, so ultimately the game will be easy for teachers and students to use as part of science classes or in after-school programs.

"But more important," says Shaffer, "once we know how to create computer-generated mentors for this game, we can provide mentoring as part of any educational game."

The research consortium has an additional $300,000 grant to develop an assessment system that will do a better job than existing standardized tests at showing whether students have learned to solve real-world problems like those they face in "Urban Science."

"The problem with standardized tests," says Shaffer, who is also a game scientist with the Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, "is that they test the wrong thing. They test whether students have learned basic facts and basic skills, and not whether they can solve real problems."

Shaffer and his team are developing and validating an assessment system to provide instant feedback on students’ learning without using traditional standardized tests.

"Again," says Shaffer, "if we can do it for this game, we can do it for any game — and we can do it any time we care more about solving complex problems rather than learning basic skills. This is a new way of thinking about assessment for a new century."

Two more grants let Shaffer and his colleagues use the same techniques to improve undergraduate instruction at UW-Madison. Collaborating with associate professor Naomi Chessler in the College of Engineering, the team is developing computer games to make engineering a more diverse profession.

A $500,000 project will develop the computer game "Nephrotex," which Shaffer and Chesler say has the potential to increase the number of women and minority students in engineering programs. In the game, players work as part of a fictitious engineering firm using nanotechnology to design a better dialysis machine.

"The game will give undergraduates an early look at the kind of work real engineers do," says Chesler, a view of the profession that isn’t always clear as students plow through required math and science courses.

"Too often, students don’t get a chance to see the human side of engineering until they’ve gone through a lot of coursework," says Shaffer. "Students get intimidated and drop out. If we can build a game that lets freshmen interested in engineering solve complex problems, they can get a better understanding of how the things they learn in their other classes make sense and fit together."

The game is also funded, in part, by another $200,000 grant led by professor Wendy Crone in the College of Engineering to create a nanotechnology certificate program for engineering undergraduates.

Shaffer is quick to point out that projects on this scale are possible, partly because of the ongoing support UW-Madison has shown for research on computer games and learning. With faculty working in several departments across campus, "UW is one of the leaders in this field," says Shaffer.

Students with video gaming did better with the zoning maps; they had developed the visual hand to eye skills to be able to infer meaning with their actions. Students who spent less time gaming had greater difficulty with the maps….

The key point? That the visual skills from gaming are not necessarily just hand-to-eye. They are hand-to-eye-to-mind.

A recent hoax, in which the Manhattan Airport Foundation proposed a new airport be built in Central Park, fooled both the Huffington Post and Inhabitat, a weblog about sustainable design.

The Foundation’s site is convincing. The site uses slick design, planning language and high standards of presentation, but funniest of all, justifies itself by touting the environmental benefits (with scientific studies cited) and the variety of stakeholders who support it.

That it is even possible to make such an absurd proposal so convincing speaks to the complicated nature of land-use decisions and urban planning in general. It reminds me of one team of Urban Science planners who technically made the numbers work in a land-use proposal by turning the Overture Center, Madison’s premier arts and cultural center, into a parking lot. They presented their plan to live stakeholders, who were predictably outraged, and that team learned a valuable lesson about thinking through all the consequences of their decisions.

Maybe the folks at the Huffington Post would benefit from playing Urban Science…

He also quotes epistemic games researcher Elizabeth Bagley, “There are tradeoffs and consequences, and these are things they need to deal with as a planner. They are learning how to really facilitate compromises because there are stakeholders whose goals don’t overlap.”

While the game facilitates collaboration and critical thinking, it also connects young people to the environment and to their neighborhoods. View the full article on the Journal Sentinel website, or a PDF here.

‘Well, Maria thought that she did the assignment wrong,’ I replied.

‘I can’t believe that. Her map was amazing. She had the entire city zoned for specific uses,’ responded the student.

‘Maria said that all of the other kids drew houses with smoke coming out of the chimneys and trees in the lawn.’ 

‘They did, and they were totally lame,’ the student said decisively. 

But that’s not what Maria thought. Since her work looked nothing like her peers’, she assumed that she had done the assignment wrong.  She even threw it away shortly after receiving a grade (an A) on it, not recognizing her own innovation since her teacher hadn’t.

That’s why I was excited that the student remembered Maria’s work a year after she had observed her class, and I followed up by talking with the teachers-in-training about the messages we too often send our children in school, the message that their work is little more than a means to a grade. I hope that Maria’s story helped some of the students think outside of the traditional ‘assessment box’ and inspired them to reflect on how they measure success in their classrooms.  

This short video gives an overview of our work on Urban Science and other epistemic games as part of the Macarthur Digital Media and Learning Project and the National Science Foundation.

In these games, players have a chance to learn 21st century skills by playing as urban planners, engineers, journalists, and other professionals in the knowledge economy.

I suppose next we’ll need to make an epistemic game about making epistemic games….

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/ijgcms-bagley-shaffer.pdf