Leveling Up

Supporting and Measuring High School STEM Knowledge Building in Social Digital Games

Lead Staff:
Jodi Asbell-Clarke
Jamie Larsen
Elizabeth Rowe
Teon Edwards

Summary

Through Leveling Up, EdGE designed a series of mobile and browser-based games that are fun to play and publicly available and that support and measure standards-based high school science concepts. The play mechanics in the Leveling Up games are tightly tied to the related content, Newton’s First and Second Laws, optics including light reflection and refraction, and bird flight.

EdGE researchers studied the Leveling Up games to understand how digital games played for fun outside of school can be used to support and measure players’ standards-based high-school STEM learning. In order to do this, EdGE designed, developed and validated a set of game challenges (assessments) to measure individual players’ implicit STEM knowledge using educational data mining and the digital game log data.

Project: Leveling Up

Ravenous – one of the three games developed by Leveling Up.

Research Activity

EdGE worked with a cohort of high-school teachers to design, develop, and test bridge activities that leverage STEM learning that takes place in out-of-school digital gaming and utilizes that knowledge in high-school science classroom activities. EdGE researchers used the game-based implicit learning assessments and bridge activities in an implementation study to understand what types of design and facilitation support high-school STEM learning in digital games.

Videos

Presentations

Asbell-Clarke, J.. “Games, the New Frontier of Learning”, 07/01/2011-06/30/2012, 2012, “Talk presented at Emergent Learning: Turning Tides in 21st Century Education, Halifax, Nova Scotia.”.

Asbell-Clarke, J.. “Game Designers: A New Breed of Educator”, 07/01/2011-06/30/2012, 2012, “Talk to be presented at 9th Annual Games for Change Festival, New York, NY”.

Asbell-Clarke, J.. “Games and Ubiquitous Science Learning Environments”, 07/01/2011-06/30/2012, 2012, “Talk presented at Cyberlearning Summit 2012, Washington, DC”.

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Asbell-Clarke, J. & Rowe, E. (2015, July). Framing of implicit science learning in games. Presentation as part of the Leveling Up: Measuring and Leveraging Implicit STEM Learning in Games symposium at the 11th annual Games+Learning+Society conference, Madison, WI.

Asbell-Clarke, J., Rowe, E. & Sylvan (2013, June). Working through Impulse: Assessment of emergent learning in a physics game. Paper presented at the Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, WI.

Asbell-Clarke, J., Rowe, E., Edwards, T., & Larsen, J. (2013). Leveling Up: Measuring Tacit Science Understanding Through Gameplay. Paper presented at the NARST Annual International Conference, Rio Grande, Puerto Rico.

Asbell-Clarke, J., Rowe, E., & Sylvan, E. (2013, April). Assessment Design for Emergent Game-Based Learning. Work-in-progress presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’13). Paris, France.

Eagle, M., Rowe, E., Hicks, A., Brown, R., Barnes, T., Asbell-Clarke, J., & Edwards, T., (2015, October). Measuring implicit science learning using networks of player-game interactions. Work-in-progress presented at the ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, London.

Eagle, M., Brown, R., Rowe, E., Hicks, A., Barnes, T., Asbell-Clarke, J., & Edwards, T. (2015, July). Interaction networks to measure implicit science learning. Presentation as part of the Leveling Up: Measuring and Leveraging Implicit STEM Learning in Games symposium at the 11th annual Games+Learning+Society conference, Madison, WI.

Eagle, M., Brown, R., Rowe, E., Asbell-Clarke, J., Barnes, T., & Edwards, T. (2015, June). Exploring Problem Solving Behaviors in an Optics Game. Poster presented at the Eighth international conference on Educational Data Mining Society in Madrid.

Fraser, J., Shane-Simpson, C., & Asbell-Clarke, J. “Youth science identity, science learning, and gaming experiences. ,” Computers in Human Behavior, v.41, 2015, p. 523.

Hicks, A., Eagle, M., Rowe, E., Asbell-Clarke, J., Edwards, T., & Barnes, T., (2016, April). Using game analytics to evaluate puzzle design and level progression in a serious game. Paper presented at the Sixth International Learning Analytics & Knowledge conference, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Rowe, E., Asbell-Clarke, J., Eagle, M., Hicks, A., Barnes, T., Brown, R., & Edwards, T. (2016, June). Validating game-based measures of implicit science learning. Paper submitted to the Ninth international conference on Educational Data Mining in Raleigh, NC.

Rowe, E., Asbell-Clarke, J. & Baker, R. (2015, July). Strategic moves as measures of implicit science learning. Presentation as part of the Leveling Up: Measuring and Leveraging Implicit STEM Learning in Games symposium at the 11th annual Games+Learning+Society conference, Madison, WI.

Rowe, E., Bardar, E., & Asbell-Clarke, J. (2015, July).   Teachers bridging implicit and explicit science learning. Presentation as part of the Leveling Up: Measuring and Leveraging Implicit STEM Learning in Games symposium at the 11th annual Games+Learning+Society conference, Madison, WI.

Rowe, E., Baker, R., & Asbell-Clarke, J. (2015, July). Strategic moves as mediators of implicit science learning. Paper presented at Eighth international conference on Educational Data Mining society in Madrid.

Rowe, E., Baker, R., Asbell-Clarke, J. Kasman, E., & Hawkins, W. (2014, July). Building automated detectors of gameplay strategies to measure implicit science learning. Poster presented at the Seventh international conference on Educational Data Mining Society in London.

Rowe, E., Asbell-Clarke, J., Bardar, E., Kasman, E., & MacEachern, B. (2014, June). Crossing the bridge: Connecting game-based implicit science learning to the classroom. Paper presented at the 10th annual Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, WI.

Rowe, E., Baker, R. & Asbell-Clarke, J. (2014, June). Studying implicit science learning in digital games. Poster presented at the 3rd annual Cyberlearning Summit in Madison, WI.

Sylvan, E., Asbell-Clarke, J., Fraser, J., Plemons, K., & Rowe, E., (2013, August). It’s not who I am, it’s what I do: How Youth Gamer Identity and Beliefs about Social Perception Relates to Their Science Understanding. Paper presented at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference held in Atlanta GA.

Vieyra, R., Edwards, T., Rowe, E., & Asbell-Clarke, J. (2015). Playing with science: Using electronic games to foster inquiry. Science Teacher, 82(5), 3-11.

Game Download

The games Ravenous is available for free.

Download Game