Kris Scopinich is Education Director at Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary. Her interest is in developing learning environments that encourage youth to explore their connection to the environment as well as the role they can play in its conservation.
Robin Stuart is the School and Groups Program Coordinator and Teacher Naturalist at Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary. She specializes in freshwater ecology, herpetology and falconry.
As the saying goes, imitation is the best form of flattery. How could we argue with the age-old phrase?
Epistemic Games deliberately copies real-world situations to create convincing games, mimicking a profession as accurately as possible to create the professional feel of the game. To achieve this, our team identifies professionals and professional environments to emulate in a game.
The current imitation project at Epistemic Games is AutoMentor. Our game designers are creating an automated mentoring program so that instead of a person chatting online in real-time with players, the program could respond to in-game situations and interact with the players. But like any other project, we need a template to model our game feature.
For this, we choose Robin Stuart. Robin is an Education Coordinator for Mass Audubon, a collaborating institution for Epistemic Games. She has taught in classrooms before, but is currently a Teacher Naturalist at Mass Audubon where she teaches environmental education through experimental and inquiry based learning in informal settings.
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One of the big questions that we have been looking at in the Epistemic Games Group in recent years is whether the newer “all online” versions of our games give players the same kind of experience (and thus offer the same opportunities for learning) as the “live” versions we were using several years ago.
(For those new to the Blog, our AutoMentor project is all about providing computer-generated mentors in epistemic games that will give the same kind of feedback as real mentors. To make that happen, the most recent versions of our games have mentors communicating with players through chat sessions online, rather than face-to-face.)
I just returned from running a short study at the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary outside of Boston that sheds some interesting light on that question.
In the study, kids played two slightly different versions of Urban Science.
One group was ten high school students who interacted with mentors through an internal chat program.
The other group was eleven high school students who interacted face-to-face with mentors in the room.
The players were randomly assigned to each group, and everything else about the two games was the same (or as close to the same) as we could make it.
We’re just starting to analyze the data, but on at least one key dimension we already have a really strong result.
When the game ends, players take an exit interview that contains seven questions about how engaged they are in the game.
The first question is whether they thought the game was fun. With only two exceptions, every player said the game was fun. (And to be fair, those two exceptions were…well, exceptional kids.)
The other six questions are adapted from Green and Brock’s (2000) narrative questionnaire which is an instrument used to measure the level of engagement that readers have in a book.
Here’s the thing:
There was no significant difference between the two groups on these measures of engagement.
In fact, on average, the players chatting with mentors online were slightly more engaged in the game than the players who were talking with mentors face-to-face–although again, that difference was not statistically significant.
So, are epistemic games engaging? Yes. Are they engaging just because kids are in the room with mentors? No.
Which means, in theory, if we can automate the mentors through the relatively thin medium of chat, we may be able to get a lot of engagement without a lot of overhead…
For those interested in the details, a technical report will soon follow.
