Games+Learning+Society 10 Conference

Discussant:  Sean Duncan

It’s better to talk with honey than vinegar: Insights into collaborative learning within mobile AR games
Denise Bressler
According to the National Research Council, the ability to collaboratively solve problems is of the utmost importance in scientific careers, yet students are not exposed to learning experiences that promote such expertise. Researchers have found that interdependent roles used within mobile AR games are an effective way to scaffold collaborative problem solving. Using a multiple case study approach, this study assessed communication responses, scientific practices, and language style used both by student teams playing a mobile AR science game and teams participating in a control activity. Conversations amongst game teams revealed not only higher levels of scientific practices but also higher levels of engaged responses and communal language. Conversations amongst control teams revealed lower levels of scientific practice along with higher levels of rejecting responses and commands. Implications for these findings are discussed.

Citizen Science in the classroom: An analysis of teacher-student discourse
Amanda Barany, Christian Schmieder, Jilana Boston, Kurt Squire
Preliminary analyses of a classroom implementation of the game Citizen Science suggests that patterns of lexical choices in teacher-student interaction may have implications for the projected efficacy of games in classroom settings. This proposal discusses consequences of our exploratory analysis of educator-student interactions while playing Citizen Science in a classroom setting. We will explore how these findings will inform subsequent implementation of telemetric game data and qualitative interviews with students. Furthermore we will introduce a series of tools and techniques for field workers and educators, designed to playfully reflect on lexical choices when implementing games in institutionalized educational contexts.