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Gina Svarovsky: Thinking like an engineer

Filed at 5:52 pm on February 28, 2007 in Games • 1 comments

In an earlier post on the Macarthur blog, Edward Miller, a senior researcher at the Alliance for Childhood, was quoted as saying: “There is no evidence that video games are good at teaching problem-solving or… higher-order skills.”

Sadly—or perhaps I should say, happily—that’s simply not true.

In the game Digital Zoo, players become biomechanical engineers and design creatures of the kind you might see in an animated movie. And it turns out that, yes, by playing as engineers they learn to think about problems the way engineers do.

In one test, for example, we ask players before and after the game to draw a flowchart of how they would solve an engineering design problem. Their design process, as reflected in the flowcharts, becomes significantly more complex—and more like the real engineering design process—after playing the game than it was before. In other words, they learn to think more like engineers.

This was a carefully-designed study as part of my dissertation research. The design problems we asked them to solve before and after the game had nothing to do with the content of the game itself. The players of Digital Zoo don’t use flowcharts of this kind in the game, so they weren’t merely getting better at drawing flowcharts. We created problem isomorphs (meaning problems with the same structure but different details) so players would not be getting better at solving the problem because they had seen it before. And it was a month between the tests before and after the game.

To make sure this was not just an artifact of the test or the statistics, we conducted a controlled study. Just as we presented the design problems to players of Digital Zoo before and after the game, we gave the same problem to players of another game of the same duration—but that game was about being a journalist rather than being an engineer.

The results held up. In fact, before the games, players of the engineering game did significantly worse than players of the journalism game at thinking like an engineer. Afterwards, the players of the engineering game did better.

In other words, playing a well-designed game CAN help you learn creative, higher-order thinking.

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