Exploring Learning Trajectories in Collaborative Educational Games

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  In Roundtable Session: Informal Learning Environments as Spaces for Building Mathematical and Computational Thinking Skills

Abstract

This paper studies how learners develop computational literacy in playing a 2-player collaborative constrcutionist game through investigating the play logs. The paper builds on the work in play-tracing and game learning analytics. We present data from 128 sessions with 3 types of learning outcome: play-based (n=31), goal-based (n=20), and general play(n=77). The results showed that players develop their knowledge of the game through Explore, Tinker and Refine (ExTiRe), a learning framework that shows how novice programmers learn to program (Berland et al., 2014). The study contributes to the field by adding empirical evidence on how learners learn in playing contructionist game. Additionally, it presents a scalable and reproducible method in investigating learning games.

Authors

• Eda Zhang, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Yunseo Lee, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Matthew Berland, University of Wisconsin - Madison