Student Interest, Game Design, and Computational Thinking in Studio K Classrooms

• In Event: Research on Digital Media, Games, and Simulations in Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives
Building from best practices of constructionist game design, we developed Studio K, a curriculum to teach game design thinking and computational thinking in concert with each other. Studio K integrates game design and programming within an online community in which learners play, revise, and create games in the Kodu learning environment as they navigate design challenges. These challenges target fundamental concepts distilled from literature on game design and learning (e.g., Gaydos & Squire, 2012). By helping learners create their own games in an authentic, artifactual, socially-oriented curriculum, Studio K enables engagement and meaningful connections with the content.

In this talk, we show how students’ creative processes in Studio K relate to interest and motivation. We designed the study, in part, to better understand how motivation relates to fine-grained metrics of how students are learning to build. Do more interested students progress more quickly? When, why, and how does expressed interest interact with moment-to-moment engagement?

Perspective
The experiment was structured as a design-based research experiment (Barab & Squire, 2004). The project investigates how the informal game design curriculum fosters development of computational thinking practices and basic programming skills through making games. We focus on metrics of process and interest rather than traditional evaluations of success.

Methods
This study presents a model of how survey measures of interest relate to logged in-world metrics of student programming and game design (e.g., program complexity, revision activity).

Data sources
The data set for this paper represents learning analytic data from four classrooms with 76 students. Each classroom ranged from 2-4 weeks of active participation with Studio K, with 45-90 minutes spent per session. Data are derived from logged interactions with Studio K curricula and a modified version of Kodu used to build our ADAGE telemetry architecture from (Halverson & Owen, in press).

Results
Surprisingly, analysis of ADAGE telemetry data reveal that measures of complexity and game/program quality are not significantly correlated with external measures of interest. Specifically, measures of code complexity, revisions, and the number of objects programmed are not significantly correlated with the interest measures in our survey (likelihood of future courses on programming, importance of learning to program, and interest in having a job related to game design). Interestingly, in addition to finding no significant correlations among complexity of game design projects and interest in game design/programming, we also found no significant relationship between gender and game complexity. In fact, the girls created slightly more complex code than the boys. Additionally, a linear regression demonstrates that code complexity is likely to increase over time, with higher average skill levels developing across all users and significantly increasing with the number of days in the curriculum (p < .001).

Significance
Since young women are less likely to voice an initial attraction to programming (Margolis and Fisher, 2002), the lack of correlation between game/program complexity and expressed interest is particularly promising. The talk will examine possible implications of our findings.

Authors

• Gabriella Anton, Northwestern University

• Shannon Harris, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Amanda Kay Ochsner, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Matthew W. Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison