Exploring How Learners Use a Serious Game for Middle School Science Through Visualization

• In Event: 60.064 - Evidence-Based Technology Integration Scenarios

Abstract

This study intends to use data visualization to examine learners’ behaviors in a 3D immersive serious game designed for middle school science to understand how the players interact with various features of the environment to solve the central problem. The findings indicated students in the high performance groups tended to use the tools more appropriately relevant to the problem-solving stages they were at, and used the tools more productively than students with low performance groups. The use of data visualization with log data in combination with traditional data shows visualization as a promising technique in analytics, especially with multidimensional datasets and can facilitate interpretation of the relationships among multiple data points at no cost to the complexity of the data.

Authors

• Min Liu, The University of Texas - Austin

• Jina Kang

• Jaejin Lee, The University of Texas - Austin

• Elena Marie Winzeler, Six Red Marbles

• Sa Liu, The University of Texas