Learning ― Second Project Progress Report
Gary Knoll, John Lansing, Laoleng Xiong, Keisuke Nishimoto
1. Progress
We have completed two major portions of our learning research project. The first task was to interview the creator of AgentSheets, Alex Repenning. The minutes from this meeting can be found here: http://l3dswiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/dlc-2006/117. The second portion of our project was to interview a teacher from a local school. We were able to contact and interview Alice, a local middle school teacher. The transcript of this interview can be found here: http://l3dswiki.cs.colorado.edu:3232/dlc-2006/119.
2. Next Tasks
The next portion of our project will fall into two tasks. The first task will be to evaluate AgentSheets from a computer science standpoint, so that we can weigh in our opinions in our final report. We will each download an evaluation trial of the software and learn and analyze its basic functions. John and Kei will take charge of this task.
The second task we must carry out before creating our final report will be to interview middle school students in regards to AgentSheets. It may be difficult to coordinate this kind of meeting with such little time left in the semester, in which case we will turn to Leng's brother. We plan to use the Bridge Builder applet created in AgentSheets as our test platform. An overview of the questions follows:
- Pre interview questions:
- What do you know about bridges?
- Have you ever used games for learning before?
- If so, was it fun? Was it helpful to learn something new?
- Then let kids play with the application (no specific tasks)
- Post interview questions:
- Was it fun? Do you want to play more?
- Did you learn anything you hadn't known before?
- What do you like/dislike about it?
- How can we make it better?
Gary has been given the task of coordinating this interview session, hopefully with some of Alice's students. Leng will also help to conduct the interview session.
3. Final Report
For our final report we plan on evaluating AgentSheets from three different perspectives: creator's, middle-user's and end-user's. By looking at this platform from these various perspectives, we should be able to garner enough information and should be able to make some conclusions about the usefulness of AgentSheets, and what should change about it to make it better. Each member of the group will contribute to this document, and we will base our final presentation based on the findings we report on in this final paper.