Dispatches from the front lines

Epistemic games, by design, are very difficult. The concepts, the terminology, decisions, the challenges are usually completely foreign to our young players. We can ask young people to do work that would likely be impossible for most of them to do by themselves precisely because the games provide careful scaffolding. A primary source of that scaffolding are in-game mentors who interact with the players via chat as they play.

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.”