Game Design Commons^™

A Usability Study On Shape Shape Hooray: An Adaptive Educational Game Associating 3d Geometric Shapes To Daily Objects, Winna Mia Victoria D. Buenviaje, Ma. Anniela B. Dela Cruz, Ingrid Marie Therese P. Fadriquela

Goal 4: Quality Education

Situated learning theory argues that learning is embedded within an activity, context, and culture. It posits that students are more likely to learn if they have an exposure to the authentic context of the learning environment. Based loosely on this theory, Shape Shape Hooray is an adaptive educational game that aims to teach basic 3D geometric shapes by allowing basic education students associate 3D shapes to daily objects. As an adaptive game, this paper discusses the paths developed for different kinds of players (no prior/low prior, average, and high prior knowledge). A usability test was conducted to which a generally …

Experiencing Poverty In An Online Simulation: Effects On Players’ Beliefs, Attitudes And Behaviors About Poverty, Pedro Hernandez-Ramos, Christine M. Bachen, Chad Raphael, John Ifcher, Michael Broghammer

Teacher Education

Digital simulations are increasingly used to educate about the causes and effects of poverty, and inspire action to alleviate it. Drawing on research about attributions of poverty, subjective well-being, and relative income, this experimental study assesses the effects of an online poverty simulation (entitled Spent) on participants’ beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Results show that, compared with a control group, Spent players donated marginally more money to a charity serving the poor and expressed higher support for policies benefitting the poor, but were less likely to take immediate political action by signing an online petition to support a higher minimum wage. …

Game Types, Game-Related Behaviors And Resilience: Creating A Roadmap For Effective Gamification Design In Higher Education, Patrick Marino

Dissertations

Gamification, or the use of game-based mechanics and thinking in real world applications, is on the rise in educational environments. While various applications seek to increase engagement and motivation for tasks related to student success, research regarding best practices for the design of such systems is lacking. In fact, conflicting outcomes from various gamification studies at the secondary and tertiary education levels suggest that not all gamification designs are effective for increasing student success. Meanwhile, research from the medical field indicates gamification can be used to increase resilience; which has been linked to various student success outcomes including academic performance. …

Software Design Considerations For Mathematics In Mobile Games, Katherine Smith, Yuzhong Shen, Anthony Dean

VMASC Publications

A software system has been designed and developed to allow for the display, symbolic manipulation, and player entry of mathematics expressions in mobile games. Display, manipulation, and entry of mathematical expressions are traditionally difficult tasks. Increased limitations on screen space and user input when developing for mobile devices only exacerbate these difficulties. The developed software system balances considerations for ease of use and user interaction with the desire for players to be able to enter answers in a way that is more flexible and interactive than multiple choice, which is the dominant method of interactions in serious games. The software …

Re-Playing Maimonides’ Codes: Designing Games To Teach Religious Legal Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Lost & Found is a game series, created at the Initiative for

Religion, Culture, and Policy at the Rochester Institute of

Technology MAGIC Center.1 The series teaches medieval

religious legal systems. This article uses the first two games

of the series as a case study to explore a particular set of

processes to conceive, design, and develop games for learning.

It includes the background leading to the author's work

in games and teaching religion, and the specific context for

the Lost & Found series. It discusses the rationale behind

working to teach religious legal systems more broadly, then

discuss the …

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Prosocial Religion And Games: Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

In a time when religious legal systems are discussed without an understanding of history or context, it is more important than ever to help widen the understanding and discourse about the prosocial aspects of religious legal systems throughout history. The Lost & Found (www.lostandfoundthegame.com) game series, targeted for an audience of teens through twentysomethings in formal, learning environments, is designed to teach the prosocial aspects of medieval religious systems—specifically collaboration, cooperation, and the balancing of communal and individual/family needs. Set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the 12th century, the first two games in the series address laws in Moses Maimonides’ …

Your Iphone Cannot Escape History, And Neither Can You: Self-Reflexive Design For A Mobile History Learning Game, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter focuses on the design approach used in the self-reflexive finale of the mobile augmented reality history game Jewish Time Jump: New York. In the finale, the iOS device itself and the player using it are implicated in the historical moment and theme of the game. The author-designer-researcher drew from self-reflexive traditions in theater, cinema, and nonmobile games to craft the reveal of the connection between the mobile device and the history that the learners were studying. Through centering on this particular design element, the author demonstrates how self-reflexivity can be deployed in a mobile learning experience to …

Finding Lost & Found: Designer’S Notes From The Process Of Creating A Jewish Game For Learning, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article provides context for and examines aspects of the design process of a game for learning. Lost & Found (2017a, 2017b) is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed to teach medieval religious legal systems, beginning with Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (1180), a cornerstone work of Jewish legal rabbinic literature. Through design narratives, the article demonstrates the complex design decisions faced by the team as they balance the needs of player engagement with learning goals. In the process the designers confront challenges in developing winstates and in working with complex resource management. The article provides insight into the pathways the team …

Introduction: Jewish Gamevironments – Exploring Understanding With Playful Systems, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

The study of Judaism, Jewish civilizationi, and games is currently comprised of projects of a rather small set of game scholars. A sample of our work is included in this issue.

The Birds Of A Feather Research Challenge, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Neller presented a set of research challenges for undergraduates that allow an excellent formative experience of research, writing, peer review, and potential presentation and publication through a top-tier conference. The focus problem is the analysis of a newly-designed solitaire card game, Birds of a Feather, so potentials for discovery abound. Open access talk slides, research code, solvability data sets, research tutorial videos, and more are also available at http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/puzzles/boaf .

Time Travel, Labour History, And The Null Curriculum: New Design Knowledge For Mobile Augmented Reality History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to …

Playful Ai Education, Todd W. Neller

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this talk, Neller shared how games can serve as a fun means of teaching not only game-tree search in Artificial Intelligence (AI), but also such diverse topics as constraint satisfaction, logical reasoning, planning, uncertain reasoning, machine learning, and robotics. He observed that teachers teach best when they enjoy what they share and encouraged AI educators present to teach to their unique strengths and enthusiasms.

Lost & Found: Order In The Court -- The Party Game, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The second game in the series, Lost & Found: Order in the Court …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Designing An Intervention For Novice Programmers Based On Meaningful Gamification: An Expert Evaluation, Jenilyn L. Agapito, Ma. Mercedes T. Rodrigo

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Gamification is defined as the addition of game-like elements and mechanics to non-game contexts to encourage certain desired behaviors. It is becoming a popular classroom intervention used in computer science instruction, including CS1, the first course computer science students take. It is being operationalized to enhance students' learning experience and achievement. However, existing studies have mostly implemented reward-based game elements which have resulted to contrasting behaviors among the students. Meaningful gamification, characterized as the use of game design elements to encourage users build internal motivation to behave in a certain way, is contended to be a more effective approach. The …

School Has A Bad Storyline: Gamification In Educational Environments, Irene L. Pynn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

School often has low engagement and frustrating or absent options for the kind of agency the Federal Government's 2016 National Education Technology Plan now recommends educators include in their curriculum. Video games offer opportunities for people to participate in critical problem solving through creative projects. From balancing character statistics, to collaborating with other players, to making ethical and tactical decisions that can change the outcome of the story, successful games draw on the player's interest in learning and analyzing numbers, locations, visual clues, narrative elements, people, and more. One useful example may be found in visual novels (VNs), a medium …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

Synergy: Game Design + Qur'an Memorization, Sultana Jesmine Moulana

Theses and Dissertations

The rise of digital technology has transformed nearly every part of our daily lives, including the way we learn and memorize. Such transformations raise interesting questions for one of the most long-standing and demanding memorization tasks in the world: the memorization of the Islamic holy book, The Qur’an. For Muslims, The Qur’an is a timeless, sacred text, cradling within its covers many profound images, stories, and parables. Despite rigorous research in the fields of game design and memorization techniques, very little work has been done in combining these two areas of research to create a game-based memorization experience of The …

Pedagogy At Play: Gamification And Gameful Design In The 21st-Century Writing Classroom, Danielle Roney Roach

English Theses & Dissertations

The language used to discuss play in current academic spaces tends to center around formal games (and computer games in particular in the 21st century classroom). Scholarly conversations tend to distort the actual practices that occur in classrooms and subsequently limit the scope of any investigation of the pedagogical function and outcomes of those practices. This project explores the use of play and games in the classrooms of nine composition instructors. From these stories, this project begins to map out a taxonomy in order to begin building toward a pedagogy of play for 21st century writing classrooms. Using a multiperspectival …

Medulla: A 2d Sidescrolling Platformer Game That Teaches Basic Brain Structure And Function, Joey R. Fanfarelli, Stephanie Vie

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article explores the design and instructional effectiveness of Medulla, an educational game meant to teach brain structure and function to undergraduate psychology students. Developed in the retro-style platformer genre, Medulla uses two-dimensional gameplay with pixel-based graphics to engage students in learning content related to the brain, information which is often pre-requisite to more rigorous psychological study. A pretest posttest design was used in an experiment assessing Medulla’s ability to teach psychology content. Results indicated content knowledge was significantly higher on the posttest than the pretest, with a large effect size. Medulla appears to be an effective learning tool. These …

Individual Differences In Digital Badging: Do Learner Characteristics Matter?, Joey R. Fanfarelli, Thomas Rudy Mcdaniel

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Badge use has rapidly expanded in recent years and has benefited a variety of applications. However, a large portion of the research has applied a binary useful or not useful approach to badging. Few studies examine the characteristics of the user and the impact of those characteristics on the effectiveness of the badging system. This study takes preliminary steps toward that cause, examining the effectiveness of a badging system across two web-based university courses in relation to the individual differences of the learners. Individual differences are examined through the lens of Long-Dziuban reactive behavior types and traits. Results revealed differences …

Alpha, Beta, Launch: A Newbie's Guide To Educational Video Game Development, Colleen Krahulik, Lori Goszczynski

Journal of Interactive Humanities

This paper details the process we went through to develop an educational video game, which includes: research on implementing video games into the classroom, vendor selection, video game design, and curriculum development. Throughout the video game development process, we faced challenges such as budget, time constraint, and varying areas of expertise. This paper serves as a guideline for similar organizations interested in educational video game development.

Play game on desktop or tablet: www.avma.org/videogame

Play within browser: https://www.avma.org/KB/K12/videogame/index.html

E-Volving Information Literacy Tutorials With E-Maginative And E-Ngaging Design, Damecia Donahue, Axa Liauw, Rebeca Peacock, Jill Wurm

Library Scholarly Publications

Presentation on May 22nd, 2014, at The Workshop for Instruction in Library Use (WILU), at Western University, Ontario, Canada.

Ar Physics: Transforming Physics Diagrammatic Representations On Paper Into Interactive Simulations., Yao Zhou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A problem representation is a cognitive structure created by the solver in correspondence to the problem. Sketching representative diagrams in the domain of physics encourages a problem solving strategy that starts from 'envisionment' by which one internally simulates the physical events and predicts outcomes. Research studies also show that sketching representative diagrams improves learner's performance in solving physics problems. The pedagogic benefits of sketching representations on paper make this traditional learning strategy remain pivotal and worthwhile to be preserved and integrated into the current digital learning landscape. In this paper, I describe AR Physics, an Augmented Reality based application that …

Digital Interactive Games For Assessment: A Study Of The Effectiveness Of A Digital Game As A Measure Of Students' Understanding Of Boolean Logic, Mohammad Ali Haji

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Digital games have been used mostly for entertainment but recently researchers have started to use digital games in other areas such as education and training. Researchers have shown that digital games can provide a compelling, creative, and collaborative environment for learning. However, the popularity of computers and the Internet brings this question to mind: Are the assessment methods falling behind and remaining traditional? Will the traditional methods of learning and knowledge assessment be sufficient for this new generation who are starving for new technology? This study investigates the effectiveness of using a digital interactive game as an assessments method - …

Teaching Algebra Through Functional Programming:An Analysis Of The Bootstrap Curriculum, Robert Lee

Theses and Dissertations

Bootstrap is a computer-programming curriculum that teaches students to program video games using Racket, a functional programming language based on algebraic syntax. This study investigated the relationship between learning to program video games from a Bootstrap course and the resulting effect on students' understanding of algebra. Courses in three different schools, lasting about six weeks each, were studied. Control and treatment groups were given a pre and post algebra assessment. A qualitative component consisting of observations and interviews was also used to further triangulate findings. Statistical analysis revealed that students who completed the Bootstrap course gained a significantly better understanding …

Adventures In The Classroom Creating Role-Playing Games Based On Traditional Stories For The High School Curriculum, Csenge Virág Zalka

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is to develop a template for turning traditional stories into role-playing games for the high school curriculum. By developing 3 sample games based on Greek mythology, Arthurian legends, and a widespread folktale type, I explored the process of creating games that fit the limits of secondary classrooms and can be used to address specific educational standards. The sample games were tested with groups of high school and college students, and the results of the testing sessions evaluated in a narrative case study format. Feedback from the testing sessions was incorporated in the template, the final …

Effective Knowledge Development In Game-Based Learning Environments: Considering Research In Cognitive Processes And Simulation Design, Amy B. Adcock, Ginger S. Watson, Gary R. Morrison, Lee A. Belfore

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Serious games are, at their core, exploratory learning environments designed around the pedagogy and constraints associated with specific knowledge domains. This focus on instructional content is what separates games designed for entertainment from games designed to educate. As instructional designers and educators, the authors want serious game play to provide learners with a deep understanding of the domain, allowing them to use their knowledge in practice to think through multifaceted problems quickly and efficiently. Attention to the design of serious game affordances is essential to facilitating the development of domain knowledge during game play. As such, the authors contend that …

Game Assessment For Miltary Application, Patricia Mcneese

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The primary purpose of conducting this research was to establish game assessment guidelines and characteristics for integrating elected characteristics of games into ongoing instructional approaches. The cost of repurposing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) games could offer a considerably lower cost alternative than the cost of creating a new instructional game developed for a specific instructional goal. The McNeese Game Assessment Tool (MGAT), created for the assessment of games in this usability study, is currently in a beta stage and was found to have potential for future game assessment. The overall assessment indicated that the tool was effective in analyzing game products for …