Children’s Games for Learning Physics and Social and Emotional Skills

• In Event: Innovating Through (Online) Games to Improve Educational Outcomes

Abstract

Purpose
The key goals of this demonstration are to establish that the use of scientific game and assessment design results in effective and engaging games. Games to promote learning have contributed to our understanding of instruction, assessment, and motivation. Yet, some games are developed and marketed with little understanding of scientific design or formative and outcome assessment. Our game suite, “Engage-CRESST” can be taken as a model to illustrate instructional design and in-game, outcome and transfer performance. We also use crowdsourcing as a key method for game improvement. “Engage-CRESST” will illustrate accelerated learning, effective design infrastructures, pedagogical research, and systematic assessment and evaluation.

The “Engage-CRESST” games and assessments are designed for elementary school children, for classroom and web-based settings. The learning goals are to develop understanding of force and motion concepts by solving multivariate problems involving propulsion, direction, mass, friction, speed, and time. These games and assessments are tied to the New Generation of Science Standards and require cognitive demands of problem-solving, prediction, and reasoned explanation. In addition, the games address social and emotional learning (SEL), including perspective taking, emotion identification, and resilience development.

Methods and data sources
Experts developed ontologies (or relational maps) to identify key concepts to be covered in the games. In “Go Vector Go (GVG),” students explore relationships in mass, speed, propulsion, and friction by controlling a train using a free body diagram. In “Submarine Adventure,” students learn vector addition by controlling a submarine using a geometric representation. Finally, “Team Vector” integrates physics and SEL concepts to solve a range of problems. The games were tested in classrooms in a variety of settings, with the major empirical test involving an entire school over four weeks time.

Conclusions
Data suggests that the games are effective. For example, data from 277 K-5 students playing GVG shows performance growth from pre to post (d = .89) after 45 minutes of gameplay and data from 117 students that played “Team Vector” also shows performance growth (d = .30) following 30 minutes of gameplay.

Performance items were created using an asset-oriented design approach identifying assessment components and sampling rules. Validity studies were conducted to examine technical quality of the items, specifically—predicted relationships, sensitivity to instruction, and ability to differentiate expertise. The items were tested across a range of students with different degrees of supervision, and were subjected to bi-factor analyses and expert-novice contrasts.

Evaluation of games and assessment elements was also conducted through crowdsourcing studies on Mechanical Turk and other web sites. Our methods are applied to the evaluation of games created by developers targeting the same content and population. Findings will test the generalization of our methods. Our approaches to game and assessment design and validation have implications for instructional sequences and measures in and outside of technology. Finally, game tryouts in classrooms also suggest that teachers are ready to integrate such interventions in classrooms, and our curriculum support for teachers and a narrative in which to place the games, seems to be productive strategy.

Authors

• Eva L. Baker, University of California - Los Angeles & CRESST

• Girlie C. Delacruz, University of California - Los Angeles

• Gregory K.W.K. Chung, University of California - Los Angeles

• Ayesha Madni, University of California - Los Angeles

• Noelle Griffin, University of California - Los Angeles