AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
How can all students be assured the opportunity to learn significant STEM content? How can we as educators make STEM teaching more inclusive and motivating? The Epistemic Games Group seeks to answer these questions through the development of automated mentoring technology, called AutoMentor. This program, building on previous automated tutoring systems that help teach kids math and science through conversations in natural language, will help to provide motivation and mentoring for STEM students. The development of an Automentor will take place through successive iterations of Urban Science and Land Science at Massachusetts Audubon Society sites.
AutoMentor also helps us assess how well students think and act like STEM professionals within epistemic games. In doing so, the project explores whether an automated mentoring system can provide effective professional feedback from non-player-characters. The AutoMentor module represents a significant contribution to our knowledge about both learning in general and game-based learning specifically and will provide a powerful technology for incorporating STEM expertise into STEM educational activities.
Recent posts for AutoMentor: Virtual Mentoring and Assessment in Computer Games for STEM Learning
Bagley, Elizabeth A. S. (2011) Stop Talking and Type: Mentoring in a Virtual and Face-to-Face Environmental Education Environment. University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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. Continue reading »
AutoMentor is a collaborative effort which seeks to create an automated tutoring device which can be implemented across game platforms to teach 21st century skills. With this program, we look to provide players with the motivation and guidance needed to learn and complete tasks in games such as Land Science. In addition, AutoMentor can help our researchers assess how well the players are thinking like professionals while playing the game.
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.
