Hi Lisa! Thanks for the question. Student access to computers and/or tablets outside of school hours is part of our screening process when selecting classes to participate in research studies. Because this access is vital to our study, we only accepted teachers into the study if they reported in their applications that a majority of their students have access to these technologies after school hours, either in a school or public computer lab or in their homes (owned or borrowed through a school program). We ranked the quality of their technology access based on the information teachers provided and created the Control, Game Only, and Bridge groups so they had, as a whole, have comparable levels of technology access. For the upcoming Zoombinis study, we will also be asking teachers about classroom access to technologies as some Bridge activities rely on gameplay. As we have done with out-of-school access, we seek to create comparable groups in terms of the in-class technology access.

We are working with Val Shute and Matthew Venture of Empirical Games to develop assessments of computational thinking. We are still in the development and testing phase. The items are a set of logic puzzles whose solution is made easier with computational thinking skills in the same way Zoombinis is.
Our current grant and prior work focuses on in-school learning with games, but we too see many applications of this work in informal settings.

Have you been able to tease out an reliable differences between the way learners interact with your game across in-school and out-of-school settings? Amidst all the research in the learning sciences that talks about the social context of learning this seems like it could be a neat way to use the same treatment across settings and see what plays out.

Tamara, we’re only at the very beginning stages of our research, and looking across in-school and out-of-school isn’t part of our current plans, but you ask an interesting question. It could be interesting to see if differences between in-school and out-of-school play of the game occur.

If you do decide to go the in-school comparisons with out -of school route get in touch with me! I would be interested to follow or even collaborate on your work.

Tamara, again, we’re only at the very beginning stages of our research, so unfortunately, we don’t have enough data to be answering questions like this yet. Completely anecdotally, we can see shifts in players’ behavior when they move from from randomly trying things, to testing a hypothesis, to implementing a solution; for some players, repeated experience with this probably does involve building an awareness that’s beyond the specifics of a particular puzzle. This is part of what we hope to explore. In addition, experience with research on our other games suggests that gameplay alone can help build tacit understanding of concepts, but that the role of the teacher is vital to players making the connection between those tacit understandings and explicit school content. As you say, the “bridge condition” is a place where teachers may involve their students in connecting what a player is doing in a puzzle to a general CT skill, reflecting on the process of finding a solution, and transferring what they are doing to other contexts.

It seems like you have a lot of good ideas about how to focus your research agenda going forward.

I would be especially interested to hear how you would pinpoint and distinguish or identify instances when a player is “testing a hypothesis” vs. “randomly trying things”

Vivian, great questions. Unfortunately, we’re too early in our research to answer any of them.

Thank you for the comment Helen!

Hi – we are gathering all of the data forms you mention. We use video observations to build our initial “groundtruthing” about what types of strategies and moves players are using that are consistent with our model of CT learning. That helps us ensure we are building complete data distillers that will capture and calculate the parameters we need for our data mining models.

We also use pre-post tests (in development and validation with partner Val Shute of Empirical Games) to measure the impact of the game under the various study conditions (control,game, and bridge)

In addition we collect teacher reports of what happens in class, and we are conducting observations and interviews in a few sample classes.

thanks for you interest!

Interesting question. In our past studies we have found that teachers seemed less comfortable with the gameplay than their students. But in this case, Zoombinis is a game that some of these teachers played themselves as a child or remember for when they were teachers in the 1990’s. It will be interesting to see if that nostalgia factor plays into more effective education.

Hi Sophie – Zoombinis was developed by TERC in the 1990s and was published by Broderbund (and their successors). It then went dormant as the publishers did not update for newer computers. In 2015, TERC partnered with FableVision and the Learning Games Network to re-release Zoombinis on today’s platforms. It was developed in Unity.

absolutely. We are currently building the distillers (based on observations) for the data logs and data mining models and research are one of the primary outcomes of the project.