Middle school girls play three week version of Digital Zoo

After conducting an epistemography of an undergraduate engineering design course, we designed a 45-hour version of Digital Zoo which was implemented as a summer enrichment program in 2005. Working in teams of three, players designed wire-frame character prototypes for an upcoming animated film. Advanced undergraduate engineering students worked with the teams as Design Advisors, providing guidance with the design process as needed.

Several mechanical and biomedical engineering graduate students worked with the players as clients, meeting with them frequently to provide feedback and opinions on their design work. At least three clients came in at the end of each week for a formal design review with the players, creating a professional setting for the design teams to present their engineering progress.

Results

During the 2005 version of Digital Zoo, data was collected primarily through pre, post, and follow-up interviews with the players. Preliminary analysis of this data suggests that players were able to develop components of the engineering epistemic frame as a result of gameplay. To learn more about the specifics of the results, click

Engineering skills, knowledge, and values

During the interviews, players were asked to help the city of Chicago make a decision about the seats on its public transportation vehicles. Players were given a sheet with information about three design alternatives, asked to choose which one would be the best for the city, and why. The number of features identified by players during the decision making prcess increased significantly from pre to post interview (+1.3 mean increase, p<0.01).

Engineering epistemology
Players were asked to create a flowchart that described the steps they would take in solving the design problem of building a tower out of toothpicks and marshmellows. These flowcharts increased significantly from pre to post interview, both in the number of links (+3.0 mean increase, p<0.05) and nodes (+3.5 mean increase, p<0.05).

Engineering identity
The number of Digital Zoo players who indicated they had thought of themselves as engineers increased from pre- (2/7, 29%) to post-interview (7/7, 100%, p<0.01), with all players responding positively to the Have you ever thought of yourself as an engineer? question in the post-interview. Five players (71%) linked their engineering identity to external expert interactions. In addition, there was a statistically significant correlation between player references to expert interaction and receiving expert feedback (r = 1.00, p<0.01). For example, when asked whether she had ever thought of herself as an engineer in the post-interview, one student responded, Yeah, during Digital Zoo. When asked when specifically she felt like an engineer, she replied:

“Like the [Friday] presentations and the presentation at the end. That was when I saw myself as an engineer I liked presenting my things and showing everybody what I made I learned that there were things I could change about [my designs] because they like they had certain things to say about it like some things worked better than like another thing so then I could like make mine even better.”

In other words, meeting with the external engineering experts and receiving feedback on their virtual creatures were essential to the process of engineering identity development for the Digital Zoo players.

Publications

Engineering girls gone wild: Developing an engineering identity in Digital Zoo.

Svarovsky, G. N., & Shaffer, D. W. (2006). Engineering girls gone wild: Developing an engineering identity in Digital Zoo. Poster at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Bloomington, IN.