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 examined the interactions between players and mentors in one epistemic game, Urban Science. Using a new method called epistemic network analysis, we explored 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.

Full article can be viewed here.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/graesser-automentor-0410141.pdf

We identified the speech act categories and clusters of discourse comments of journalism mentors who interact with students editing news stories. Two important speech act categories are evaluations and suggestions. Latent semantic analysis and principal components analyses helped us discover clusters of comments involving evaluations and suggestions. The comments of mentors were also significantly aligned with epistemic frame elements that motivate the comments at a deeper level of discourse and pedagogy. Such alignments were validated by logistic regression analyses on a sample of hand-coded judgments of the frame elements. There was some modest transfer from a journalism practicum corpus to a game corpus. These analyses provide an important first step in building a virtual AutoMentor for multiparty epistemic games.

View the winning paper here.

Working as a mentor in an epistemic game is also very difficult.

We work with a limited amount of information about what the players are doing: we chat with the players via instant message, but we can’t see the players screens, can’t read their body language, and can’t hear the live conversations that they have offline.

So we are thrilled when we get information from our partners who are on the ground with the players. Here are two, from two versions of Urban Science we are running right now:

1. “Just thought you should know that I found out today that Amanda [not her real name] goes home and talks about this program every week non-stop to her parents over dinner. So, she’s pretty excited about it and enjoying herself.”

2. “That was so cool today. The changes you have made since last year have really made a difference. The access to chatting with mentors and the ability to track the targets as the changes are being made in the maps make all the difference. On the way to lunch, I overheard kids talking about the changes they made and getting close. The child with Aspergers was really engaged and wanting to make the target changes.”

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.

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.

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…

Epistemic games have been developed to help players develop domain-specific expertise that characterizes how professionals in a particular domain reason, communicate, and act (Shaffer, 2006; Shaffer & Bagley, 2009). Grounded in a sociocultural and sociocognitive approach to learning, epistemic games are designed to foster situated learning that leads to data structures with high levels of dependencies. As one might expect, traditional measurement models struggle to accommodate such contextual dependencies, especially when data are collected at smaller scales and epistemic network analysis (ENA) has been developed to provide a practically feasible modeling alternative (e.g., Rupp et al., 2009; Shaffer et al., in press). In this paper, we describe a research program that addresses key statistical considerations for modeling data from epistemic games using ENA with an eye toward representing different learning progressions of players within such games. Current approaches for representing learning progressions using ENA are juxtaposed with approaches for simulating such data using particular statistical constraints.

DreamYard places artists, of all disciplines, in public schools for yearlong residencies, where they collaborate with subject teachers to co-design, co-plan, and co-teach art projects that support the teachers’ curricula. In my time with DreamYard, I saw how the arts could transform people and schools. In many ways, my time there was an ideal preparation for working on epistemic games.

There are currently no fine arts based epistemic games in development (many of the games, however, do involve design, writing, publishing, and presentations). But there are a few principles that DreamYard Project, and 826 Valencia and the other locations inspired by it, have in common with epistemic games.

For one, they all recognize that schools, as currently constructed, are not doing the job. There is a need for creative alternatives. There is a need, as Eggers says, to make school not like school.

They all seek to connect children and their schools with external professional communities (hello, Mr. Dewey). DreamYard and 826 Valencia connect children and their schools with local artists. 826 Valencia is an actual publishing company with writers and editors working in the same space that the community kids work. DreamYard artists work in their own theater and dance companies, run art studios, and publish and perform their work; to the best of their abilities they attempt to recreate these communities in public school classrooms. Epistemic games simulate the practica that are the gateways to professional communities. In the past few years, engineering, journalism, urban planning, and local government games have been implemented in schools, after-school programs, and summer programs. It’s so important to give young people access to the world of adults. Adults are, after all, what we will eventually need them to be.

They all give the students a platform to share their work with the world. 826 Valencia publishes books of their students writing that can be purchased on Amazon. DreamYard students have performed at Lincoln Center and had their work hanging in Sotheby’s. Players of epistemic games have published their news stories online, and presented plans and proposals to their city’s mayor. The important lesson here is that students are motivated when their work matters.

They are fun. 826 Valencia is also a pirate outfitter. DreamYard, although set in classrooms with rigorous academic standards, still focuses on creative play and expression. And players of epistemic games consistently talk about how much fun they have when they play, despite the hard work. A key ingredient to a fun program is how seriously it is taken. The little touches, the minor details, are what make the game or the program more motivating. The details may be whimsical, like a vat of eyeballs to replace ones lost at sea, or practical, like the business cards that players of epistemic games use. But ultimately, the more complete the world created, the more exciting it is to be a part of it.

Of course, the epistemic games research group is not a community based organization, so the scale of our operations and our priorities are necessarily different. But it’s exciting to see these different movements taking on the challenge of imagining alternatives, creating possibilities for kids from the ground-up. I can only echo David Eggers’ plea that everyone get involved with their local young people, either through schools or separately, and offer kids a glimpse of what kind of adults they could be.

Yet, according to the same study, the number one use of technology by teachers to facilitate student learning?

Assigning homework or practice work.

From the perspective of someone who spends most of his time designing and testing educational games, the fact that so many believe that games are effective learning tools is heartening. The fact that technology in schools is mostly limited to something as mundane as assigning homework tells me just how far we have to go. New technologies, including games, need to be used to change what happens in schools, not simply as new (and very expensive, I might add) ways to do the same old things. Until then they aren’t anything more than better pencil sharpeners.