This is a targeted research project that studies the venue of serious games as a vehicle for engaging the public with NSDL resources. It is being undertaken by the Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE). EdGE is developing and studying the Arcadia Resource Center, a prototype transmedia venue for NSDL resources to serve an existing serious game population in a state-of-the-art virtual world with associated hand-held and social networking media. In this project, a small-scale environmental climate-crisis game is being designed and tested. The Arcadia Resource Center is being used to disseminate game resources from the NSDL Pathway "Climate Literacy Energy Awareness Network" (CLEAN) for use by players in this game.
EdGE is also bringing together key partners in the area of serious games along with members of NSDL's CLEAN Pathway and the STEM exchange initiative to create an initial design for a Serious Games Pathway.
Expected outcomes from the project include: * A new audience of lifelong learners using NSDL resources; * An increased quality of STEM-based serious games through use of NSDL resources; * New possible models for using NSDL resources with gamers and game developers, including a Serious Game Pathway; and * Models of new modes of learning, assessment, and research (such as "lifelong learning chronicles") that game players can use to maintain their STEM resources for use in multiple venues, and also that educators and researchers can use to study how NSDL assets are being used in knowledge building communities.
Project Outcome Report The Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE) at TERC proposed an 18-month targeted research project to study the venue of serious games as a vehicle for engaging the public with NSDL resources. This project had five outcome goals: Goal 1. Identify scientific digital assets that have the greatest potential to support a prototype game, documenting the process to understand how to build and leverage these types of relationships among future partners. Goal 2. Build and adapt user interfaces for existing EdGE social media and collaboration tools to use with digital scientific resources in a prototype game. Goal 3. Design, develop, and study a prototype game for the public with embedded scientific digital resources. Goal 4. Gather partners from other serious games programs in STEM to help design a Pathways project and cohere expertise in the field. Goal 5. Report findings to the NSDL and science education through presentations and journal articles as well as develop a design for a Serious Games Pathway for NSDL. EdGE worked with partners: GameGurus (a game development company), Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and Institute of Learning Innovation (external evaluators); to design, implement and study an alternate reality game for the public using digital STEM resources. EdGE studied what design features did and did not help achieve these goals and documented the design and implementation process for others to learn from. This award was a targeted research project for a program (NSDL) that was disbanded during the lifetime of this project. Thus, goal #4 was revised to build partnerships that would support ongoing work in public games that use public scientific resources. This project’s intellectual merit stems from its attempt to capture the enthusiasm of digital gaming environments and embed NSDL resources where people choose to spend time (Ito et al., 2008), making learning more relevant to their world (Wagner, 2008; Hulleman & Harackiewicz, 2009). The broader impact of this work comes from the lessons learned from the prototype and groundwork laid in impacting a new audience of learners, many who may be disengaged from formal STEM learning, but are eager to interact and utilize STEM resources in a serious gaming context. The main accomplishments of this project are: This project has created a first-of-its-kind alternate reality game using professional scientific digital resources and design strategies based on research grounded learning models This project has developed new strategies for facilitating learning (e.g. through playing characters) in games of scientific inquiry Results from this research were presented at Games+Learning+Society, an important conference in the educational game design field and inform EdGE’s expanding work in educational gaming environments. EdGE has a much broader network of colleagues in the areas of science, game design, and educational research as a result of this work. The game Canaries in a Coalmine was always intended to be a prototype for the purposes of research, but we also had hoped it would have significant impact as a product on its own. This did not happen. The experience served, however, as a fruitful research study (findings found in second section of this report) and also provided a solid base for current EdGE work. In addition, one workshop has already been run to repurpose the game as a classroom tool and Canaries will be used as part of EdGE’s work with high school teachers during our current DRK12 work. We plan to re-launch the game (or at least major parts of the game) when we have a larger audience already established.
