MIT Education Arcade, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution, will design and develop Mass Extinction, an eight-week environmental science game proposed as a new genre called the curated game, a hybrid of museum-going, social networking, and online gaming. Participants will engage in Earth systems science to study a range of environmental issues associated with mass extinction. Although the game is structured around a fictional scenario--communication with visitors from the future--the game will posit a future scenario affected by current environmental issues and conditions, and will encourage participants to apply systems thinking as a means to understand how these current conditions will lead to potential environmental disruptions. Thus, it will be necessary for participants to study, apply, and integrate knowledge and skills from multiple sources, including Earth science, ecology, chemistry, and paleontology. An Advisory Board and contributing scientists will be involved.
The project team will test the hypothesis that the game play will allow youth, ages 11-14, to increase their understanding of the scientific process and increase their motivation to learn more science. The summative evaluation will be conducted by TERC Inc.
A Curated Game Handbook will be produced to disseminate project results as a model for new applications of game-based learning. Open source software created as part of the game will enable future developers in informal science education to build directly upon these foundational efforts.
Vanished (working title: "Mass Extinction") was an eight-week long collaborative mystery-solving game, designed to extend the reach of the Smithsonian Institution beyond its walls and draw thousands middle-schoolers into scientific thinking, practice and habits of mind. Whereas traditional scientific instruction focuses on rigidly defined processes, perfect prediction of results, and memorization, professional scientists’ work tends to involve collaboration, experimentation, and the unexpected. Vanished addressed this gap between traditional classroom instruction and real world practice, and boosted engagement, through the creation of a highly interactive "curated game." To model these scientific processes, we developed a set of diverse activities tied into the common context of solving a science-based mystery. Activities included video conferences with Smithsonian scientists, in which players shared their hypotheses on what might have happened and asked for feedback; virtual archaeology digs, where players used a Flash game to navigate an area and dig up objects, some of them actual 3D scans of bones from the Smithsonian collection; collaborating with other players on the forums to analyze secret documents and decide what research steps to take next; and citizen science challenges where players had to collect environmental data (such as local temperatures or identifying flora and fauna) and analyze it to determine how our climate differed from that of a fictional future. These activities were distributed via an internet portal, free of charge, to any child age 10.5-14 who was interested. We promoted the game via media interviews, drawing 6,000 young players and thousands of adults to our site. Many players, including players from groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields, becoming deeply engaged with the game and its science content and activities. Our evaluators qualitatively evaluated a randomly selected sample of about half the forum posts, and they found that players expressed: "overwhelmingly positive feelings about the game and its components, and describing extensive engagement, even being ‘obsessed’ with the game. In addition, players saw real value in ‘working together…to research and learn to solve a problem’ like "REAL scientists solving a REAL mystery." Several described how much they learned about different scientific fields and about the process of doing science — the "tools and tips on how to become better scientists" as well as so many "great hypotheses" and "all the theories and ideas in one place." Players felt "inspired", wanting "to do more science-y and math things" and "imagining when we all have famous jobs at research centers across the world." They felt respected, and appreciated that they were "talked to like our opinions and theories were awesome and like our input was important…Vanished is a bunch of awesome and smart people…who cared what each other had to say & worked together to solve a problem, not throwing out an idea cause it wasn’t liked or because of the person who came up with it. I think that’s cool." One of the most promising anecdotes came from a classroom teacher of at-risk middle schoolers in a public school in Idaho. He found that previously unengaged students became highly engaged, worked hard on science-related tasks, and even said that they wanted to be scientists when they grew up. Nearly half our players (48.4%) were girls, and they were retained throughout the game at the same rate as boys. Approximately half our players came from zip codes classified as rural, and a quarter from zip codes classified as urban. Vanished, and games like it, have the power to engage previously uninterested young people in the field and practice of science in ways that traditional educational interventions cannot. Vanished also draws young people to educational resources (such as Smithsonian scientists and digital objects) that they may never have otherwise encountered or cared about. We plan to create similar curated games in the future, based on the open-source Vanished game and website code, which we are publishing for free use by all designers and educators. Future efforts will focus on outreach to minority and lower income players.
