Proposal Contents:
Project Concept
Project Motivation
Areas of Inquiry
Background Research
Methods
Summary
We intend to create an entertaining, educational game to provide additional learning opportunities for a wide audience of players. Successful games are characterized by their ability to capture a player's attention for a long period of time, which suggests that such games are entertaining. In contrast, many educational games are considered to be boring, which leads them to be ignored in favour of more "interesting" games. We plan to strategically design an educational game that will be considered entertaining, so that the content itself is engaging and appeals to the players. The educational content that will be integrated into this interactive learning tool will be determined with the collaboration of the San Diego Zoo.
Two problems faced by the San Diego Zoo are declining patronage and a lack of information retention. Exhibits in the San Diego Zoo currently feature plaques with general facts on the animal. After talking with Donal Boyer, the curator for the reptile and amphibian exhibits at the San Diego Zoo, it was found that few people, if any, even take the time to read display signs. We believe that adding educational games to the exhibits could bring more people back to the zoo and increase the amount of information that they retain. Success has been demonstrated in other areas with interactive learning environments; and research has shown that children, in particular, tend to be motivated to use interactive digital media. We believe that this would be an excellent opportunity to implement game-based learning in an environment outside of the lab.
Our plan is to utilize the new user interfaces such as MERL's Diamond Touch and Microsoft's Surface touch tables in order to implement a number of learning games for several exhibits at the San Diego Zoo. The unique characteristics of touch interfaces will enable us to provide patrons with a platform that stores their information for subsequent visits. We would be able to record the number of visitors who engage with the interactive displays, and adjust our programs by tracking which games result in the best retention and which most accurately convey the information. These results would not only be beneficial to the field of computer-aided learning in general, but also to the public at large, including the San Diego Zoo.
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For our project, we were motivated by the San Diego Zoo story "A World Without Frogs?". We believe we can create an interactive educational game to help provide information to zoo visitors. We envision a game that can convey how industrial growth is leading to the extinction of certain species, and how these effects are exacerbated by pollutants and the introduction of non-indigenous species into stable environments.
Educators often marvel at the time and energy which young people invest into playing video games. Because players often master complex situations provided in entertaining video games, it suggests that players are learning during the course of such game-play. For example, Halo 3 and Age of Empires may teach many 21st century skills such as adaptability, self-direction, risk-taking, interactive communication, prioritizing goals, planning, and management of resources. The same attentive learners do not generally devote a comparable amount of time to playing educational games. Currently, educational games do not enjoy the market penetration of entertaining games: of the top forty video games of 2006, the only educational game present is "Brain Age". Educational researchers have recently begun experimenting with games as pedagogical tools (i.e. serious games) across multiple domains, including history, business, physics, mathematics, language acquisition, and computer science education.
In the United States and Canada, about 60% of the population aged 6 and older, from all socioeconomic backgrounds and from both genders, enjoy playing games. The widespread appeal of games among children creates an opportunity for the delivery of educational content, and has the potential to supplement the effectiveness of traditional education. Elementary and high school students reported a variety of reasons for being interested in using gaming technologies for learning. These reasons included difficult concepts being made easier to understand; an increased ability to be engaged in and to learn about the subject; and study and review of topics being made interesting. Gee identifies properties of computer games that engage players in active, critical thinking that informs their decisions in both the virtual and real world. Using an interactive game, players have unlimited opportunities to rehearse new skills and receive personalized feedback on choices made during game-play. Providing such games to school-age children may help struggling students to retain and understand material.
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We intend to explore general questions about game design and interfaces as we apply these concepts to our work; we will also investigate more specific problems relating to educational games placed in public forums such as zoos. We believe that a great deal of learning can take place when visitors are invited to explore and discover for themselves, so we plan to use an intuitive touch-based interface to implement our game.
In addition to allowing an appropriate hands-on experience for visitors, experimenting with such software/hardware will allow us to examine which game design principles can translate nicely to the touch interface and which ones are better suited to more conventional methods. We will also have an opportunity to look at general HCI interface principles, to see if some should be added to the repertoire of game designers - specifically designers who are using touch technology.
We hope to be able to provide an innovative addition to zoos to help foster visitor appreciation for wildlife through entertaining, educational games. Our project's premise is in line with the San Diego Zoo's education mission: "[T]o increase the knowledge and appreciation of animals and plants in people of all ages through a wide variety of educational programs and services.". This will give us a chance to study information retention - we believe that the information we are presenting is important, so we want to ensure it is remembered.
One area of investigation is developing age appropriate material and interaction mechanisms. We plan on targeting a short game for ages 5 to 9; children who interact with the game will have additional information they can convey to the other people (parents, older siblings) around them. Providing children with the ability to tell others about the material will reinforce what they've learned and foster group interaction that is a big part of walking through a zoo.
We will also create a list of general concepts and principles that are necessary for a zoo game. We intend to use these principles to make our game fully extendable beyond the scope of our specific research. This would add versatility to our project by allowing others to continue this style of game to other animals, environments, and environmental concerns.
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The project will require research into game analysis: What makes a game appealing? Entertaining? Are users engaged - cognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally? What is the best method to present educational information? What approach makes information easiest to understand? How do we prevent educational concepts from being overshadowed by game mechanics?
We hope to discover an effective way of displaying important concepts in a game-based setting, which will invite the user to experiment and investigate a subject to a further degree. In our research, we will look at some different methods of teaching and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We will attempt to discover why game-based learning is often more powerful by investigating several other different teaching strategies such as lecture, recitation or discussion groups. This analysis will help us to understand the difference between 'surface' learning and 'deep' learning, and which practiced methods have the ability to reinforce theoretical elements and aid in their retention and understanding.
Our main focus of will be to discover which aspects of an educational game contribute to its success. We will investigate several games that include motivational, learning and interactive components. The experimentation with different interactive learning tools will help us understand the most effective way to present important data in a game-based setting, and to determine which game type is best suited for our project.
By studying different interfaces, we hope to learn the best way to integrate the educational material into our game. As user involvement is a factor that will greatly contribute to success, we will design our game such that the player can become fully engaged with the material. We will conduct studies to help determine an appropriate length for the game. We can continually make revisions by running play-tests for elementary students so that we can condense the game into a form that best presents the concepts.
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We will develop a game or interaction that, within a minute or two of playing, will communicate at least as much information as would be conveyed in the typical information placards found near zoo exhibits. Our interactive learning experience will be targeted at a young audience, those aged five to nine. A successful educational game should introduce concepts at a basic level and provide immediate feedback; engage the user cognitively and behaviorally, yet not require too much thought; minimize the time necessary for a meaningful session; and minimize the required text.
After finding the appropriate software and conducting background research into serious games, we will develop the idea behind the game as well as carefully consider the genre. We will follow a traditional cycle for game development, including: creating a game sketch that addresses artwork or rendering, character resources (time, money or points, lives, etc.), objectives, player procedures (what, how, when), system procedures, AI, collision handling, rules (objects, actions, effects), and outcome. The game sketch will include a state diagram. We will also create a paper prototype to test the game; the prototype will take into consideration possible user interfaces.
Our game design document will include the game sketch and will address the game objective and mechanics: the core game play, or the essence of the game; a technical enumeration of the state diagram of the game flow; the available characters or, if applicable, units; game play elements, or the things with which the player can interact; the game physics and statistics developed from the system procedures in the game sketch; and multi-player play. Our document will contain the distribution of labor, and will keep an up-to-date game design schedule with milestones for the waterfall life-cycle of software development.
Students will begin building the game upon completion of the game design document, including play-testing the prototype. We will investigate several of the many possible approaches for assessing and evaluating the learning potential of games, including: topic coverage, accuracy upon review, transferability, and holistic evaluation of perceived educational utility.
The project will be documented with a blog. This will allow us to keep up-to-date links and references, as well as to maintain a journal for the documentation of progress and communication among members of the group. The project will start with a student-presented project proposal to the graphics research group. We will also give a midterm and final presentation of our progress, in addition to creating a midterm report and final paper. Dr. Amy Gooch and Dr. Bruce Gooch will assist us in presenting our project in increments to Donal Boyer, curator of the San Diego Zoo reptile and amphibian exhibits.
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With CREU funding, the students involved in this project will have valuable research opportunities that are not often available to undergrad students. Students will also be able to plan and execute, from start to finish, a project which spans multiple semesters. The students in this project will apply computer science fundamentals and learn about research, while simultaneously gaining exposure to computer science applications in gaming, user interfaces, and public outreach. As most undergraduate projects are limited in scope to a well-defined problem to be solved in a few weeks, this project should expose the students in this project to conditions which are closer to those found in graduate studies or industry. The opportunity provided by the CREU will allow the students to apply theory learned in their classes to a real-world problem, an experience which is uncommon in an early undergraduate degree. Students will have a chance to learn about gaming, applications, and user interfaces, all topics which are often considered to be specialized by students.
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