What Can Students Learn From Making Games? Findings From a Research Synthesis

• In Event: 58.024 - Constructionism, Modeling, and Games: Synergies Through the Lens of Next Generation Science Standards and the Common Core

Abstract

Objectives. The examination of the educational potential of serious games has focused mostly on playing games and not on what students can learn through making, or constructing, their own games.
Theoretical Framework. We examined the educational potential of making games for learning in terms of personal, social and cultural dimensions informed by constructionist theory (Authors, 2006; Papert, 1980). Personal dimensions refer to the academic and attitudinal outcomes that making games can provide to learners. The social dimension focuses on collaborative arrangements ranging from small groups to larger groups in massive online communities (Authors, 2014). The cultural dimensions focus on how factors such as gender and race have been part of the learning arrangements and/or impacted outcomes.
Methods and Data. Between 2014 and 2015, we conducted surveys of published papers on the topic of children’s learning while making games and identified 56 pertinent studies. Collectively over 9,000 youth participated in the studies reviewed including middle school (53%), followed by high school (20%), and elementary school (9%) students with 18% of the studies including multiple school levels. Over half of studies (57%) included both female and male students as their participants.
Results. Of the 56 studies included in our review, the largest number of studies has and continues to focus on learning programming, followed by other academic subjects. Forty-four percent of studies focused on children developing computational strategies to problem solve followed by 34% explicitly dealing with children learning computational concepts while 27% examined shifts in learners’ perspectives about the nature of programming and computer science. Furthermore, 34% examined children’s own sense of learning as a particular process (e.g., “learning about learning”) while 16% of studies investigated children learning particular subject matter content through the game making process. One half of the studies took place out of schools, while the other half of studies occurred during the school day with only a few, 5%, running in combination with an afterschool program.
Scholarly significance. Making and modeling games proved to be a compelling context for learning computational concepts and practices and broadening participants’ perspectives on computing and STEM overall. These results, while overwhelmingly positive, also raised several concerns: (1) the length of involvement in game design; (2) the framing of learning with and about computation; (3) the collection of data and lack of information about race; (4) the lack of negative findings, (5) the few studies focused on collaborative learning, and (6) the absence of online opportunities.

Authors

• Yasmin B. Kafai, University of Pennsylvania

• Quinn Burke, College of Charleston