SciGames: Using Play to Bridge Informal to Formal Science Education to Attract Diverse Students to Science

In this project's first year, we have impacted 200 middle school students. Aside from this success in numbers, which will be dramatically increased once we productize and distribute our SciGames, we also measure success in terms of measurable changes in students' science affect and achievement. We built a prototype of one SciGame designed to teach about friction and conducted a preliminary study with 9 students. As regards their attitudes toward science, in re. behavioral engagement, the students, on average, did eight slide experiments without extrinsic reward. None stopped until the pilot ended. As regards their emotional engagement, the students, on average, exhibited seven instances of manifest joy (laughing, joking, singing, etc.). As regards their cognitive engagement, students, on average, exhibited four unconventional methods of experimentation. As regards their science learning, six out of the nine students could make correct statements about the source of frictional force, and of these six, four students could make correct statements about the relationship between frictional force and energy loss. Two out of nine students answered the physics pre-test questions correctly, which increased to five out of nine students answering correctly on the post-test. While preliminary, these findings suggest that a SciGame can promote positive science affect through play while at the same time supporting science learning. We are presently in the midst of conducting a much larger, more comprehensive study with nearly 100 middle school students. By productizing and distributing our SciGames, including teacher training, we will be able to positively impact the science affect and achievement of approximately 2,200 students working with an additional 20 middle school science teachers next year, and potentially even more students and teachers every year after that.

The metrics we used to acquire the above findings are as follows. To examine the effect of the piloted SciGame on students’ science affect, we wanted to assess engagement with the activity. We expected to see student engagement expressed in three ways: behavioral engagement (spontaneous play and persistent play), emotional engagement (manifest joy), and cognitive engagement (students engaging in diverse experimentation). Students’ game play was videotaped and each student was also provided with a digital audio recorder. Affective outcomes were evaluated through qualitative analysis of these observations, coding the video for the different types of engagement. The Children’s Playfulness Scale, a scale for the behavioral manifestation of playfulness, was used to construct our observation rubric due to its high reliability across samples and construct validity. Unlike the more commonly used self-report survey measures, observation tools such as ours provide the means by which to assess psychological constructs directly through students’ behaviors.

To measure the impact of the piloted SciGames on students' science learning, we looked at students’ prior knowledge and learning outcome data. Students’ prior knowledge on the topic of friction and energy was assessed with an open-ended question asking students to describe the concepts of potential and kinetic energy prior to engaging with the pilot activity (i.e., “Can you describe what these [potential and kinetic energy] mean? If you don’t know, just leave it blank.”). The purpose of pre-assessment was to examine whether a student had heard of and understood these concepts. Students’ learning was also assessed using prompted verbalization during the pilot session. Students verbalizations were analyzed for conceptual understanding of the learning goals, i.e., energy forms can be interconverted, an object’s kinetic energy is proportional to its velocity, frictional force can be varied by choice of material, and energy can be lost from a system via frictional force applied over a distance. The prompted verbalizations and observations were used instead of a post-assessment in order to capture students’ new knowledge. The prompts for the learning outcome assessment included questions such as: What can you do to lose more energy? Why is that mat making you lose more energy?