"The game places students in a three dimensional environment where they must navigate a spaceship by controlling the electric charge of the ship, placing charged particles around the space. Students must carefully plan their trajectory through each level by tracing the field lines that emanate from charged objects, and in the process of doing so, develop a more hands on understanding of how charged particles interact."Unfortunately, I can not find this game on the Internet, and only find the two pictures below.
In Dr. Squire's study in 2004, he used this game in one middle school's classroom teaching. Students in experimental group played Supercharged! during class time with supplemental materials and interactive lectures from teacher. Students in control group was taught about electrostatics through guided inquired methods, such as interactive lectures (from the same teacher), experiments, observations and demonstrations of the teacher's design. The experiment group performed better than control group in terms of their post-test scores, the difference between two groups are significant.
From this result, it seems that the game works, but Dr. Squire also took a close at what happened in classroom. By examining the class video, It can be found that as frist students in experiment group are somewhat confused by the activity(game play) and they don't know the point of the activity. And in the second day, the teacher found that students were playing the game but not critically reflected on the game. Therefore, the teacher begin to encourage students thinking such as making prediction. In day 3, the teacher used the projector to display game and let students interpret what happened on the screen and make prediction. Dr. Squire found some of the richest classroom discussion occurred at this time.
Now, in my opinion, it is not the game but the following activities that the teacher conducted contributes to the scores difference. What do you think?
Even we feel that there are so many potential advantages of video games in education, in fact there are few empirical studies that have examined the use of video games within classroom setting.
What I have learned from this research is that integrating games into classroom setting is far more complex. So in next blog I will continue this topic by introducing another researcher's study, in that study, the intervention is not just letting students play the game in classroom.
Reference
Squire, K., Barnett, M., Grant, J. M., & Higginbotham, T. (2004, June). Electromagnetism supercharged!: Learning physics with digital simulation games. In Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Learning sciences (pp. 513-520). International Society of the Learning Sciences.
I think you make a good point- it's not just the game but how the teacher chooses to use it. If he or she just says "here, play this game!" the students may miss the opportunity to learn from it.
ReplyDeleteYes I agree and you make an excellent point. I assume, the students saw Supercharged as a game at first since they are middle school aged kids. Once the teacher began to implement a classroom discussion acivity, then the students understood the point of using the game. Like Lily said, the student may miss the opporunity to learn from this activity, if the teacher just says "here, play this game!"
ReplyDeleteI like how you included a game that was very educational. I think students think of games as fun. But at the same time they most certainly be educational. In fact, this is how many like to learn. They are so used to playing games that putting an educational aspect on a topic intrigues them as well. They can be such an integral part of our instruction if used properly and effectively.
ReplyDelete