Designing Game-Based Learning Experience: Game-Level Design and Testing in Physics Playground

• In Event: 18.057 - Physics Playground, a Game for Learning: Demonstration and Posters

Abstract

Physics Playground is the medium for a design-based research project that aims to develop an engaging and valid tool to assess students’ qualitative physics understanding and increase their conceptual physics understanding via gameplay. Designing the gameplay experience for students is key to the project as it is the mechanism for learning.
The original version of the game focused on a few physics concepts (e.g., angular momentum and energy) and utilized one task type, sketching levels. In each sketching level, students draw simple machines (i.e., ramp, lever, pendulum, and springboard) to overcome various obstacles and lead a ball to hit the balloon. The current version of the game expands our focuses to a more comprehensive competency model of physics concepts. We target four parent competencies (i.e., force and motion, energy, momentum, and torque) and nine associated child competencies. To incorporate the additional competencies, we crafted a new task type, manipulation levels. In manipulation levels, the goal remains the same: guiding the ball to the balloon, but students, instead of drawing, manipulate physics parameters in the environment. They move sliders to adjust the mass of the ball, the gravity and air resistance of the environment, or they can choose to use a bouncy ball by turning on the bounciness switch.
Currently the game is comprised of 79 sketching levels and 53 manipulation levels in total. Each level is linked to its primary and secondary physics competencies by a team of physics experts to ensure adequate coverage of the competencies. Each of the child competencies has at least ten levels targeting it. We developed a Q-matrix capturing the relationship between levels and related physics competencies.
To get the target population’s opinion of the new task type, we had two formal usability tests (N1 = 24, N2 = 44) assessing the functionality and the effectiveness of the game. The first usability test examined the new task type and the preliminary learning supports. Six months later a second usability test aimed at evaluating the revised in-game supports.
Overall, students were highly engaged with the game in both tests. Based on our observation and interview, students showed that students showed great enjoyment with both task types. Out of 24 students interviewed, 39% of them preferred sketching levels while 61% of the interviewees preferred manipulation levels. Students liked the sketching levels because they had greater freedom of inventing creative solutions. They also thought the sketching levels are more challenging but allows visualizing the problem. On the other hand, students liked the manipulation levels because they could directly manipulate the physics variables and get immediate results. In addition, they didn’t need to worry about the drawing rigidly and could focus more on the movement of the ball. However, we noticed that complicated game mechanics (i.e., 4 simple machines in sketching levels and 4 physics variables in manipulation levels) and long introduction (i.e., interactive tutorial levels) were easily forgotten. Therefore, we re-designed the tutorial levels to make it shorter, simpler and more direct.

Authors

• Zhichun Liu, Florida State University

• Ginny Smith, Florida State University

• Valerie J. Shute, Florida State University

• Fengfeng Ke, Florida State University