Mining Student Designs for Evidence of Systems Thinking

• In Event: Developing Evidence of Understanding Complex Systems

Abstract

This presentation considers how to support students to develop ideas about systems through engaging them in everyday design activities that can create grounded opportunities to develop nascent understandings of key principles of systems thinking, including complex interconnections. This presentation will present a multiple case-study analysis of four students engaged in a video game design unit using a platform called Gamestar Mechanic.
This approach draws first on the idea that students might be better equipped to reason about systems in relation to a content with which they are already familiar. It also draws on recent research that including students in design activities can create a useful framework for supporting systems thinking (Hmelo-Silver, Holton, & Kolodner, 2000). Specifically, the act of design (rather than simply playing or using someone else’s design) attunes the designers to both particular decisions (elements of the system) and the impact of changing the behavior of those elements. In addition, the recursive nature of design allows the designer to play and experiment with many interconnections between elements and observe their resultant impact on the larger system.
We focus on four intentionally selected cases to present a range of ways that students demonstrated that they understood something about systems. This study took place in the context of a two-week summer camp where students were working on designs in the context of a module that focused on how to design videogames as an explicit focus; a secondary focus of the unit involved thinking of games as systems, and considering how to design well-functioning systems. Language of game design was overlapped with language of systems thinking. Students were introduced to the idea of systems thinking in the following terms: systems are made of up elements, which have particular behaviors, whose interactions shape and change the behavior of those elements and the resulting emergent dynamics of that system.
Our results point to interesting contrasts between what is revealed about students’ tacit thinking about systems through their designs, and what they explicitly say about systems in talking about their designs. Specifically, two primary conclusions are clear. First, the activity of designing games can indeed support students to develop some sophisticated intuitions about systems, and second, that gaining insight into those intuitions from the perspective of an analyst is not a trivial task. Indeed, differences between what students can show that they know through their designs, versus what they can say that they know through interviews, suggest that assessment practices must be broad in order to capture a full picture of student thinking.
The goal of this paper is not to demonstrate the efficacy of the game design unity for supporting all students to engage in systems thinking. Instead, this study is exploratory in that it interrogates what kinds of thinking about systems might be possible in the context of designing video games.

Authors

• Melissa Sommefeld Gresalfi, Vanderbilt University

• Kylie A. Peppler, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Jacqueline Barnes, Indiana University - Bloomington