Integrate educational games in the K-12 STEM classroom

• In Event: Integrate educational games in the K-12 STEM classroom

Short Description

A Framework for K–12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012) and the Next Generation Science Standards (National Research Council, 2013) pointed that to build students’ proficiency and appreciation for science, schools must provide learning environments that let students apply scientific concepts and knowledge to solve authentic problems. These learning environments should help students participate in science practice, i.e., planning and carrying out investigations, hypotheses testing, analyzing and interpreting data, and arguing from evidence. K-12 STEM teaching can be challenging because (a) such learning environments are hard to achieve in the traditional lecture-based classrooms, and (b) students may lack motivation and persistence in such exploratory environments. Educational games can be a potential solution to the challenge. Well-designed educational games provide students with an opportunity to learn by acting like real scientists: students encounter a problem(game tasks), propose hypotheses, test the hypotheses and receive instant feedback, reflect on the underlying knowledge(McGonigal, 2001; Ke, 2008; Kiili, 2005; Shute, Ke, et al., 2019). Moreover, students tend to be intrinsically motivated when playing games(Young et al., 2012). Educational games are studied mostly as a stand-alone environment(Shute et al., 2019; Young et al., 2012). But I think in order to maximize the effectiveness of educational games, more efforts are needed to investigate how to integrate such a powerful tool in traditional classroom teaching. Therefore, I would like to organize this discussion about how to integrate educational games in K-12 STEM classrooms. I would like to invite K-12 STEM teachers or other practitioners and educational game researchers to share best practices as well as potential problems that can be research questions in the future. [Topic of interest] How to integrate educational games in the K-12 STEM classroom [Activities] 1. I will share examples of classroom teaching using educational games that I found from the literature and their findings. 2. K-12 STEM teachers share their practice of using educational games in classrooms and propose problems or questions during their practices. 3. Educational researchers share their studies of using educational games in classrooms and discuss possible research questions based on real problems found in practices. [Goals] 1. Get a better understanding of the current status of how teachers design classroom teaching using educational games and their real problems. 2. Get a better understanding of the current status of research on this topic. 3. Achieve a list of research questions on this topic based on real problems practitioners encountered.

Author

• Presenter: Xiaotong Yang, Florida State University