Abstract
After 2 years of working on a design research project looking at the development of student thinking about negative numbers in the context of a computer game, I arrived at a critical problem. The game was designed such that the principles of working with adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers were integrated into the game play so that students could only achieve best scores across the game levels by utilizing these principles to make decisions during play. In as little as two sessions of 30 min of play, almost all students were able to master the basic principles as demonstrated by their success across all four game levels. When it came to measuring learning gains on a traditional pencil and paper posttest, however, students showed significant but limited gains. It was hypothesized that the factor limiting posttest scores was that students’ learning had been encoded in such a way as to reflect the purposes and goals of the game and that this encoding didn’t readily transfer to a traditional worksheet filled with addition and subtraction problems. In order to test this hypothesis, we borrowed a theoretical framework to see if students’ game playing could be conceptualized as a form of “preparation for future learning.” The results give strong support for this conceptualization of transfer in supporting game-based learning and suggest interesting possibilities for bridging game-based learning activities with the reality of more traditional school-based models of assessment.
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Notes
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Although there’s a strong resemblance between the theory that games teach “21st century skills” and the transfer theory that learning a difficult subject makes your generally more capable.
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Appendices
Appendix 1: Instructional Activity
Appendix 2: Pre-, Mid-, and Posttest (All Tests Were Isomorphic Versions of This Exam)
Appendix 3: Screen Shots of the Computer Darts Game
Here are two screen shots of the current version of the game. The shot on the right shows a scene from level 3 where the player has just missed the dart board on their last throw (which at level 3 results in a score of negative 15). The numbers at the bottom update with each throw, and on levels 2–4, the words take away and add alternate on even and odd turns, respectively. The players can see their current best score for this level as well as their current total and their current number of throws. All of these are key pieces of supporting the goal of developing strategies related to the adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers.
Here is the latest version of the Menu screen and the best scores screen. As students play, their best scores are recorded here. I enter the classroom best scores at the end of the day, and the best possible scores are there for the ultimate reference.
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Frey, R.C. (2012). Computer Games as Preparation for Future Learning. In: Ifenthaler, D., Eseryel, D., Ge, X. (eds) Assessment in Game-Based Learning. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3546-4_21
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