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Think Like a Mathematician, Save the World from Monsters

Filed by Josh Karp at 10:00 am on January 11, 2010 in Games, Participatory Learning, Schools, STEM • 3 comments

When researchers at MIT’s Education Arcade talked to Maryland teachers about creating an interactive digital math game, they usually heard the same concern: Educators believed there was potential in games but were sincerely fearful of trying to adopt games in classrooms.

“That was the challenge,” says Scot Osterweil, research director at MIT’s Education Arcade. “But, in the end, it was also the opportunity.”

With that, Education Arcade, which explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play, set out to create an online game that would line up with educational objectives, require minimal teacher effort, and provide maximum flexibility in how and when the game could be played. The basic principle, however, was one that underlies how digital media is helping to reimagine and expand the traditional lab setting, as well as how science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) are taught in schools.

“We had a strong conviction that kids are only going to engage with things they can engage with playfully,” Osterweil says. “The minute a game carries the weight of a lesson plan, the play has gone out of it.”

Thus, the game would need to be based within the world of math, but ultimately mask its academic purpose. The result: “Lure of the Labyrinth,” a digital adventure game in which middle-school pre-algebra students use math-based puzzles to search for a lost pet. Oh, and they also get to save the world from monsters.

Thinking Like a Mathematician

As kids enter the labyrinth, they know only one thing:

Your beloved pet’s gone missing and you’ve got to find it - but how? Before you know it, you’re dropped into a strange (and extremely smelly) world where your only friend is a mysterious bean-loving girl with wings. She says there are others ... Others? Other pets? Well, there sure are plenty of monsters. They’re all over the place, stinking up the joint and forcing you to do crazy jobs - you have to make pet food out of carrots and eyeballs? ICK! How in the world can any of this help you find your pet? And can you come to its rescue ... before it’s too late?

“Lure of the Labyrinth” uses analogies to math concepts, rather than straight-up computational problems. In one puzzle that tackles mathematical variables, players must figure out how a piece of machinery works—it turns out to be like a vending machine—and then uncover the denominations of items that are substitutes for coins that operate the machine. Other games teach ratio, proportion, and geometry, among other concepts. Structuring the game in this way not only teaches pre-algebra, but also helps a student learn to think like a mathematician or scientist.

“The player is confronting a somewhat chaotic world that may not make sense initially. But, through probing, they begin to understand it, they try things and figure out what may be working. They test for validity as well as nonvalidity,” Osterweil says. “That’s the way scientists and mathematicians really grapple with an idea. In some ways we are replicating the scientific process more closely than instruction does.”

Students demonstrate all of the competencies one finds in a real lab setting, but the process is dynamic rather than static. Perhaps most important, they are making their own discoveries, rather than following instructions.

“One of the reasons the game is so fun, is that you are not just following a recipe,” Osterweil says. “You are discovering something new.”

Combining the Real and the Virtual to Teach Science

Osterweil’s colleague Eric Klopfer, an MIT science education professor and co-director of Education Arcade, is doing the same thing with virtual tools, such as Augmented Reality simulation games. Students are placed in a realistic, but not real, scenario and asked to solve open-ended problems. In most cases, students are outside the classroom, solving a puzzle with the aid of a hand-held device, which tracks their location and adds virtual information to the scenario. Check out this demonstration on YouTube.

Education Arcade’s first Augmented Reality (AR) game was “Environmental Detectives.” Players used handheld GPS devices to uncover the source of a toxic spill on the MIT campus. They used real physical settings, but they also interviewed virtual characters and analyzed simulated environmental data and measurements. The result was an interactive, location-based digital game that was part real and part virtual.

“We wanted to get kids out of the classroom and into the real world,” Klopfer says. “And we wanted to do that around the notion of real world or problems.”

Students Design Their Own Games

From their experience with “Environmental Detectives,” Education Arcade moved on to develop an Outdoor Augmented Reality Toolkit. Kids could now design their own games—a form of scientific education itself—and gain a greater understanding of their environment. Games can cover everything from the distribution of trees in a particular park or the position of storm sewers. Using digital tools, players can create alternative views of those spaces.

“The fun thing about this set of tools is that their community becomes part of the lab,” Klopfer says. “It’s one thing to study and take notes on those types of things, and another to make some statement about that and share it through a game.”

Creating the games, Klopfer says, combines a number of scientific tasks, such as collecting primary data and database analysis. The process is enabled by digital media, including Google maps and GIS searches. The experience essentially expands the concept of lab science.

“It involves so many ways of interacting with the topic,” Klopfer says. “There are so many ways to understand a place through on-site lab experiences and authoring tools, all brought to bear on a single situation.”

Introducing the Games into the Classroom

Perhaps the greatest challenge to implementing Augmented Reality games as an alternative to school labs is one of time. Teachers often find it difficult to find the space and time in the curriculum to integrate the games in such a way that students can fully engage with the games.  Despite the obstacles, in a chemistry classroom, the teacher used a modified version of “Environmental Detectives” as a vehicle for schoolyard field studies. Researchers at Harvard, University of Wisconsin and MIT have used AR tools to create in-class science and math games like “Alien Contact,” “Grays Anatomy,” “Hip Hop Tycoon” and “Mad City Mystery.”

But AR games have been most successful in afterschool programs and clubs, where longer chunks of time are available.  Teachers, Klopfer says, can fill the role of scientific mentor, helping students learn how to parse and integrate data, as well as how to develop and test hypotheses. Most of all, students are excited about what they create.

According to Klopfer, digital games like these can help students learn the principles of scientific inquiry in ways they couldn’t by simply following instructions in a lab.  Ultimately, he says, it’s about meeting them where they are.

“They are in a digital media space. That’s a hook for kids doing all kinds of activities—some negative, some positive,” he says. “But I think digital tools are at the very heart of 21st-century science.” 

Download the software to create your own AR games from the Education Arcade website: http://education.mit.edu/ar

 

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