STRONG (STRuctured-scenario ONline Gaming) Project Final Report1. INTRODUCTION The development of the STRONG project came about from the idea of creating a modular, self-contained, easily accessible multiplayer interactive online learning enviornment; or in other words a STRuctured-scenario ONline Game. STRONG's main purpose is to aid students in learning domain knowledge in a specific area such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). It will do this by not only providing challenging scenarios that motivate and engage middle-school students but by also giving them a sense of freedom in their learning enviornment via a chat window, reflection space and so on. The theoretical principles underlying this project are design-based research, purposeful social collaboration, distributed cogniton, and contextual learning. Like Fischer et al., we believe intelligence and creativity are generated and sustained through active collaboration, interactions, dialogue, and shared interests between individuals and their socio-technical environments. 2. RATIONALE 2.1 Why are we doing this project? In our class, we have often talked about learning being affected by motivational AND cognitive issues. An expectation failure or cognitive dissonance initiated through discrepant events and ranking task assessments could influence learners' motivation. Using developmentally appropriate STEM concepts and standards from the Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993), we identify, use, and embed student misconceptions in STRONG to foster a deliberate STOP –> REFLECT –> THINK –> ACT approach to rekindle players' intentionality and inherent preference for goal-oriented actions and launch them into active inquiry learning. 3. RESEARCH Although the word “game” has various connotations and denotations, following Glazier (1973), Prensky (2001), and Rasmusen (2001), in our project, games refer to interactive learning environments designed to include the following basic components: 1. Player Roles 2. Game Rules 3. Goals and Objectives 4. Puzzles or Problems (Challenges) 5. Narrative or Story 6. Players’ Interactions 7. Payoffs and Strategies 8. Outcomes and Feedback (Embodying Concepts to be Learned) The idea of using computer games to facilitate learning might seem like a more recent phenomena, but a visit to the library at a local university revealed a shelf-load of textbooks from the late 1950s until early 1970s, centered on using games and simulations in classrooms to facilitate learning. Klietsch (1969) in his curriculum guideline elaborates on the underlying behavioral-learning systems theory behind learning games and simulations, and the theory’s inspiration from mathematical notions of games and simulations, models of human and social behavior, media and information theory, and learning and instructional theory. Klietsch details various unique characteristics of behavior-based simulation and games (Unit A, pp. 4-5), which include: simulation goals, capabilities, resources, means, interactions, strategy, engagement, decision-making, and problem-solving requirements. Well designed gaming environments can facilitate students’ learning both specific domain knowledge and concepts. From their review of literature over a period of 28 years, Randel et al. (1992) concluded that gaming could be used effectively to provoke interest, teach domain knowledge, and shore up retention in math, physics, and language arts when specific instructional objectives were targeted. Computer games embody good principles of learning (Gee, 2003) and motivate players by providing them with appropriate levels of challenge, curiosity, control, and fantasy (Malone & Lepper, 1987). Brendzel (2004) argues that games are good teaching strategies because they build middle school students’ conceptual understanding. Marturano (2004) advocates the use of games to help students make meaningful connections between abstract science concepts and scientific vocabulary. Funk (2002) cites studies which found that games strengthened students’ engagement, information processing, problem-solving, social development, and academic abilities. Other educational strengths of using games and simulations include developing: a variety of cognitive objectives, transferable process skills, student-centered learning, initiative, creative thought, affective objectives, completion, and knowledge integration (Ellington et al., 1998). Several factors might account for enhanced student learning using games. Gamers’ familiarity with the powerful visual media and gaming environments is one. Kafai (1996) noted that playing video games was often students’ first interaction with technology in their homes. Gamers’ active engagement in structured learning environments is another. Rendel et al. (1992) observed that students’ active participation during play could account for their better integrated cognitive structures, retention, and subsequent transfer. Gamers’ increased self-efficacy as their proficiency develops is another. Although temporary, Roe and Muijs (1998, cited by Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004) observed an increased sense of mastery, control and achievement in players as their individual gaming proficiencies improved. Gamers’ improved knowledge and conceptual understanding due to meaningful computer-based dialogue is another. Ravenscroft and Matheson (2002, cited by Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004) found that 30 minutes of collaborative learning through dialogue games (including exploratory talk, constructive conflict, and collaborative argumentation) produced significant improvements in students’ knowledge and conceptual understanding about the physics of motion. These findings are also consistent with the remarks of Bransford et al. (2000) and Ge and Land (2003). Gamers also continuously learn from the immediate feedback, both successes and failures, embedded in games. According to Prensky (2001), individuals’ learning through games is primarily due to the instant feedback gamers receive during play. 4. IMPLEMENTATION Two prototypes were developed for STRONG each one using some of the six criteria found in our Independent Research on user interfaces for learning. The need for two came about when realizing that there were certain tadeoffs when designing it one way over the other. First Prototype We will be employing a few different technologies in order to make a basic version of STRONG realized. The main component will be written in Flash and students will have access to a Java applet to showcase a unique "learning" activity. In our case, we will use the electrical circuit construction Java applet designed by the Physics Education Technology Team. Our STRONG interface will also includes provisions for chat, a reflection space, and an assessment section. The details of the user interface design will be discussed later on in this paper. There will also be a backend database, using PHP and Microsoft Access technology. We did not have time to work on the backend of the prototype this time, but with additional time, we plan on completing that too. Different elements of Photoshop and Fireworks will also be used. Here is our current user interface for STRONG.. We used first mock-up to get feedback from students. Their recommendations were very pointed and helped us improve the initial design of the mock-up. Their suggestions are all documented here and we have addressed most of them. Second Prototype The second prototype was developed in Microsoft's Visual Studio. Visual Studio provides an enviornment that gives the students a lot of simplicity and usability. A lot of students in middle school have already at some point used a PC and that PC probably ran some form of Windows as the operating system. Therefore the students are probably already familiar with buttons, text boxes etc making it easy to use. This makes the prototype very accessible as well in that I can't think of any modern day school that doesn't have a computer lab running some form of windows on it. Also because it's only one interface then there's no reloading of the screen making it very fast and less irritating to the user. Developing in Visual Studio also gives us the ease of creating such useful things as databases. As we talked about earlier, there is a real advantage in having a chat window when using a system like STRONG because it provides a community like atmosphere between the students. On the other hand there is also a big drawback in having a chat window because it opens up a lot of opportunities for the students to tell eachother answers decreasing the overall effectiveness of STRONG. This is where the database comes in handy because in this prototype of STRONG when the student clicks the "Question #" button, they get a random question pulled out of the database so that no two students will get the same question! This eliminates this fear of students cheating and is a big advantage. The big disadvantage comes when addressing the issue of presenting the user with an animated scenario which is very useful because it engages and motivates the user to use the system even more. We were unable to find a way to implement an animated / graphical scenario to our user using Visual Studio in the amount of time given for the project and so we took care of this problem in the second prototype using Flash. The structure of the system is pretty simple. It mostly revolves around catching "Button click events". Whenever a user clicks a button, depending on which button was clicked the user is presented with some new information. When it comes to consistency this user interface is right on, but it does object to one of the common dont's of user interface design in that it can make the user feel very constricted. This is because there is definitely a constrained flow throughout the system. You have to click the "Question" button before you can click the answer button and so on. To make the system truly useful and give the user the freedom that is ideal would take a lot more time and more man power than was given. As mentioned before there is one other rather intriguing part found in this prototype. A type of database has been constructed using a giant array so that the user is given questions at random. This is will become useful if a chat system is ever implemented within STRONG. A typical scenario of this particular prototype of STRONG would look something like this. First the user would click the "Begin" button and then be presented with a scenario through text. The user can then click the "Question 1" button where they will be presented with a question along with multiple answers. The user can then highlight their answer and choose how certain they are using the radio buttons. Upon pressing the corresponding "Answer" button the user will be presented with information regarding how they answered the question in the reflection space. The user may be presented with a hypertext link which they can click on to get more information about the current question. Once the user has answered the question correctly and told STRONG that they are positive this is the correct answer they can move on to the next question (the 3 questions must be answered in order). Once all 3 questions have been answered correctly STRONG will present the user's score and give them relevant information depending on how high or low their score is. For example if their score is really low they might get some constructive feedback in the reflection space along with more links and information / hints so that they can learn more and maybe get a higher score the next time they play STRONG. Or if their score is really high they could links to websites that have more advanced information or interesting demos. In the end this prototype could be considered useful in quizing users but really doesn't have the ideal functionality that we would like to incorporate. It is simple to use, it is coherent in that it only shows the user what they need to see for the most part, it is usable and it is accessible. But it really isn't very useful because we didn't have time to implement some of the algorithms and add some of the functionality that would truly make it powerful. One of the big theoretical issues that has been discussed all semester long is the difficulty of making a system both useful and usable. That theory was proven here as we can see how easy it is to fall into a trap where the system weighs heavily in one category and really lacks in the other. Overall the prototype works well 95% of the time but there are times when an unexplained "Array out of bounds index" exception is thrown which pauses the program, but doesn't crash it. Assuming we were given a reasonable amount of time to extend the project, we would definitely work on extending the usefulness and functionality of the system. At present we were unable to implement a chat system that would be very useful if we were (and hopefully plan to) turn this into a real product. We were unable to incorporate hypertext links in to the system at present as well. These would really give good feedback to the user and allow them to reflect on the questions more as well as give them more confidence when attempting to answer the question a second or third time. Finally, the system's algorithm for rewarding the user with points does not look at how positive / confident the user is with their answer. This would be a good tool for evaluating what the student / user knows and how they go about learning and answering questions. The problem with implementing this as well as the hypertext links had to do with our limited knowledge of Visual Studio. We didn't know how to read the user's current score so we could add to it until just recently and so didn't have time to add the user's certainty into the algorithm for awarding points. We still as of present don't know how to implement hypertext links in Visual Studio. 5. REFERENCES American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (1993). Benchmarks for science literacy. New York: Oxford University Press. Balasubramanian, N. (2003, June 2). Smart education: Blending subject expertise with the concept of career development for effective classroom management. Retrieved April 26, 2005, from University of Georgia, Instructional Technology Forum (ITFORUM) Web site: http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper73/paper73.html Balasubramanian, N., Wilson, B. G., & Cios, K. J. (2005, July). Innovative methods of teaching and learning science and engineering in middle schools. Paper accepted for presentation at the joint meeting of the 3rd International Conference on Education and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications (EISTA 2005) and the International Conference on Cybernetics and Information Technologies, Systems and Applications (CITSA 2005), to be held in Orlando, USA. Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., Cocking, R. R., Donovan, M. S., Bransford, J. D., & Pellegrino, J. W. (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. Cios, K. J., Pedrycz, W. and Swiniarski, R. W. (1998). Data mining methods for knowledge discovery. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. G. Fischer, E. Giaccardi, H. Eden, M. Sugimoto, & Y. Ye, (in press). "Beyond Binary Choices: Integrating Individual and Social Creativity," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, Special Issue on Creativity (Eds: L. Candy and E. Edmond), 2005. Retrieved April 11, 2005 from http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/ind-social-creativity-05.pdf Gee, J. P. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. R. Glazier, How to Design Educational Games (4th ed.), Cambridge, MA: ABT Associates, 1973. McDonald, K. K., & Hannafin, R. D. (2003). Using web-based computer games to meet the demands of today’s high-stakes testing: A mixed-methods inquiry. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 35(4), 459-472. Mitchell, A., & Savill-Smith, C. (2004). The use of computer and video games for learning: A review of literature. London: Learning and Skills Development Agency. M. Prensky, Digital Game-Based Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Randel, J. M., Morris, B. A., Wetzel, C. D., & Whitehill, B. V. (1992). The effectiveness of games for educational purposes: A review of recent research. Simulation & Gaming, 23(3), 261-276. Thorsen, C. (2003). TechTactics: Instructional Models for Educational Computing. Boston: Allyn & Bacon. Wilson, B. G. (1997). The postmodern paradigm. In C. R. Dills & A. J. Romiszowski (Eds.), Instructional Development Paradigms. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications. 297-309. 6. PRESENTATION SLIDES STRONG Final Project Presentation Slides
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