{silence} (elizabeth) so, we are now being recorded, plan accordingly. (audience) no more swearing. (elizabeth) that's right. and alright, so, i think we're ready to go. so this is eliza richardson, assistant professor of geosciences and she is gonna talk about a game they developed in the earth and mineral sciences. and then we can also talk about how this could be applied to other labs. (eliza) alright, great, thanks.
alright, so, i should say right away that anytime you want to ask questions interrupt, go ahead, because i can just blabber on without paying attention to the fact that people are hoping to get my attention. so, anyway, so, this game was one of the first projects created through the r and d initiative in the john a. dutton e-education research institute. and that r and d initiative was led by khusro kidwai. who has been hired away to southern maine. but the group of people listed there. so, khusro was the head of the r and d
initiative. jeff rayl did most of the programming for this game and he was the master student in earth mineral engineering. he just graduated over the summer. and then jason and meiyu did most of the character and sort of design work. so anytime i say, i or we really what i mean is they. when i'm talking about how this game got created. okay, so, to play this game...so this is a flash based game. and one of the guys who is part of creating this is jeff learned the program when he built this game. so, this is the first
real programming experience larger than hello world that he ever really gotten, which is pretty cool. you know, by the time he finished realized flash was on its way out, but that's still fine. alright, so the point of it was to teach the process of mineral identification to students at a distance. i have process highlighted because in my philosophy of teaching, at least for a lab like this, was that the object is not to have students walk out knowing how to identify fifty minerals, but to teach them what a scientist does when confronted with an unknown mineral and what they do to try to
figure it out. so, that was the plan of this lab. and the reason we turned this thing into a game is because we were hoping to show to that even like with the most traditional hands-on labs that geologists always say couldn't possibly work online. the rock id lab was always the one held up. how do i know if my rocks online? this is the thing we're gonna show that it really can be done. alright, so, this is the screenshot from the early history of where this thing came from was the ubiquitous rock id lab in a class that i used to teach
quite often, the large mineral gen ed class, which for non-science majors, 200 kids in a lab with ta's and lectures and multiple choice tests and that kind of thing. [inaudible] it's the kind of class where... i think it's one of the least painful way to fulfill the lab requirement if you're like an english major or something. so, those are the kind of people that we got in this class. so, in about 2006 i revamped, like, a lot of the labs because they were terrible and boring, and so, one of them was the rock id lab. so, this is kind of a screenshot from like the text of the lab where
instead of making people go through the motions of identifying twenty-five or however minerals for no apparent reason, because this class is not a prerequisite for anything else. there's never a class they're gonna take after this. where their instructor in that class is gonna expect them to identify [inaudible] samples. so, is that what we're trying to do here or what. so, really we're trying to teach them the process of science and some critical thinking. so, i made a logic puzzle out of this lab. and the idea was...oh, and if you remember, do you remember the 2006 orange bowl where penn state played florida state? anyway, it went to two overtimes because of all the missed field goals. it was a very stressful game. but i
revamped this lab sort of right after that game. and so all the gen ed students were right on top of this kind of thing. so, the plot was...okay, you've got five people. and the house five rooms and they're watching this game. and if you include half-time the game has five parts to it, not including the overtime. and they all, apparently the raw count, the clock kind of breaks down here. and so they brought, they each brought the same five mineral specimens to this party where they were gonna watch this game, but somebody stole one mineral from each person and hid it somewhere in the house at some point during the game. so, the idea is you have to identify each mineral in your box and figure out which one was stolen from which person and when during
the game and where in the house it's hidden. so, and oh, the characters that we made up for this were me, the lab ta, ed rendell, who was the governor of pennsylvania at the time, and graham spanier, and ben roethlisberger. and i mean to tell you right now that if you want to make up a game it is much better to not use real peoples names in case something happens later and you're wondering if people are gonna think you're an idiot for picking those people. so we had to pay attention [inaudible]. but here's kind of like the guts of all a logic problem. things like, um, you know, the mineral with the
metallic luster went missing during the third quarter. so, you have to figure out which minerals have metallic luster to figure out the clue. it's a little bit of a trick to write a logic puzzle like this, because you really want to make sure that every clue has exactly enough information, not too much, and not too little, so that they're forced to go through everyone of them before they can solve the puzzle. and so, okay, that's fine, and it does make them go through the process of science. because they have to make their own decision about this is the mineral i'm gonna test and this is what i'm gonna test it for because i want to know if this was the mineral that ben roethlisberger locked in kitchen or whatever. on the other hand, this little
is completely rigid framework. because of the way i wrote it, if i wanted to change the minerals or make if ten minerals or three, i would have to completely write it from scratch, because it's written exactly to work, and since we're doing this in a real life lab you would have the samples there and all the equipment that you test from, hydrochloric acid and scratch plates, and whatever else. so, the challenge to make a game out of this was to make this lab more interesting and make it a game. so, we wanted to avoid rock kits in the mail. people do that and i think it's a complete waste of time because you really don't know what shape the rocks arrive in when they get to the person on the other end.
you can't supervise them. and also, it speaks the wrong point of this lab, which is not really to learn rocks, it's to learn science. so, i think when you design something you'd have to the whole sending rock kits in the mail, it's just like it's like trying to shoe horn a face to face lab into the online environment without thinking of all the lab really is. so, what's after that? and we also want to avoid memorizing vocabulary, which is the vein of low level science classes and also tedium, identifying fifty rocks is boring if you don't care. so, we also want to include teaching the process or science, teaching
inquiry methods hopefully. and we also want to build in flexibility. so, we want to get rid of the rigid framework of my original puzzle. that was the hope, anyway. alright, so, given that we have like more people in a house, the job from the other designers were like, all, is this like game clue? and here's an interesting thing we found when we piloted this game, if your younger than, say, me, you have never played clue. kids are like, what do you mean this is modeled after clue. what does that mean? so, here's an interesting thing about clue. the main clue is trademarked by parker brothers, but the actual names of the characters are not trademarked.
so you can actually have miss scarlet instead of ben roethlisberger. and that's great! no problem. so we did that. entry screenshot of the game. there's a couple screens that's cool to kind of set you up. you're in the house watching a football game with minerals. pick your character and put your id in and go. so, here's the layout of, here's the floor plan. and it looks kind of like the clue game board, right. and so, i'm mrs. white and i'm down there and i just walk into the house. and this is kind of the complicated set up. you see it a lot of times in the game. so, the idea is that over on the left there's a bunch a toggle switches
the top one you hit if you want to leave the room you're in. the next one is the clue notebook. the there's a checklist, which is basically like your matrix of trying to figure out the answer to the puzzle. and then at the bottom, it's like the answer card that you turned in. so, one of the things that we are kind of hoping for, next steps, is that the toggle switches those icons look a lot like each other and even the definitions of them are sort of ambiguous. so, in the pilot, people were always trying to figure out, click, and unclick, and oh, that's the wrong one, and that kind of thing. but that's next. so, the deal is that you're in here and if you
click on the room your character will walk into the room. and you can actually watch the little animation of the person doing it. and then you'll get a view of the room you're in. over on the right, where the green arrow is, is the laboratory. and that's where you can do the virtual tests on the minerals. so, if you're playing the game, what you do is click on the room, you go in the room, and this one is the kitchen. over on the right, there's a little label that tells you you're in the kitchen in case you forgot. but when you run your mouse over different things in the kitchen, they all expand a little bit. and you can click on them and a little clue will pop up like this. where it'll say something like there's a fragment here for a mineral
that has a hexagonal crystal habit. or it'll say, there's chili on the stove, but no clues here, or something like that. and so now the idea is if you're a student and you don't know which mineral has a hexagonal crystal habit, you got to get yourself into the laboratory and do some tests. and every time there's a clue that pops up that says things like, there's a fragment here for a mineral that has a hexagonal crystal habit, it puts those clues in the clue book. so, you don't have to sit there with pencil and paper. and we argued about this a little bit. because i said, well, but, you know, part of the name of the game in
science is keeping track of your observations on your own. but i think...i don't know... the fact that you still have to make choices about what you're gonna test next and how you're gonna proceed and how to do the logic puzzle. they figure this is [inaudible] version. so, i lost that argument. so, all the clues are here and you can always find them. and to look at the clue book you have to click the little red clue book. and it's a toggle switch, so, to get rid of it you just click the icon again. um, if you find
out some things, like, back here, if mr. green says, that he knows you still have his magnetic mineral type of mineral [inaudible] and you know which ones those are, you can put a little x by mr. green and you know, magnetize, and [inaudible]. and later on you can fill in this. alright, so when you go down the lab to test things, your little person walks down there and then a little screen pops up where you can decide to test a particular property of every mineral or you can test
either, well, it's either by mineral or by properties. so, you can test, you know, the hardness of every mineral or you can test every single thing about one of the minerals. and when you decide what kind of test you're gonna do, it's sort of, you get to watch a little video. if we were gonna test what color magnetite is on a street plate. i'm taking videos of them now doing this. [inaudible]
but, and here is another sort of argument we had, at the end every time they do a test it basically kind of tells you what the answer is. so, even if you weren't paying attention you can see the fact that magnetite is black. and i lost that argument too, because i was sort of thinking, well, part of it is having to make your own observation. on the other hand, if it's through a computer, and color is one of the things you're looking at, then you have to realize that not everybody's screen is the same. well, the fact that you still had to make your own decision on what thing you wanted to test was sort of a winner here. it took them a long time to make all those videos. it's just kind of fun. and also
the way the storyline goes you can type kind of any property anytime. so, you actually have to be a little smart to know which ones to test so you're not sitting there watching videos all day long. you can't just and you have to select everyone, you can't just say, show me every single thing. so, at some point, when you found all the clues from the first quarter, you'll have a little screen letting you know. and then you can move along in the game. this game has a slightly rigid storyline and part of the reason to do that is because it keeps people from going right to the answer card and just guessing random things until they get them all right. you basically are
forced to find enough clues that you could solve puzzle and it won't let you submit unless you get it. so, that's part of the more science club game part i guess. the mid-way through the game you'll have a clue book full of clues and you might have your check sheet, your little matrix, bubble thing, looking kind of like this. you can type anything into those boxes. i just use x's and o's. so, for example, what this is showing is that i know miss scarlet is the one who lost muscovite and also know that quartz was hiding in the kitchen during first quarter, but i don't really know too much else yet.
once you know every single thing about a person, really anytime you can go to this answer card and select the answers from the drop down menu. so, when you get to the end and you've done all the clues, and you've tested all the minerals, you select everything from the drop down menu and then down in the bottom left corner that little, this used to be red, right, now it changes to green. this button says submit. so, this is basically how you finish, and how you turn in your work.
in fact, right now, that's just a dummy button. so, there's no database back end yet. so, right now, what people do is take a screenshot of this and turn it in, which isn't really ideal but you know, people have to graduate and move on and turn over their project to the next person. so, here we are. so, this is sort of state of the art and it basically works. i can send you the url if any of you want to mess with it and play with it. but we haven't used it in real class yet. we've only piloted it. so, over the summer
[inaudible] this past summer. we piloted it [inaudible] class with about ten students. and it this class those ten students were actually all of middle and high school teachers, science teachers. so, we had them go through the game and we asked them if the procedure was straight forward, how long it took them to play, and if the [inaudible] were okay and if it was worthwhile or not. and if they'd ever use a game like this. and what they told us was that they couldn't beat the game by random guessing, which i consider a plus. they said the navigation was not intuitive enough and i agree with that.
that's sort of the next thing to work on. and they were, they realized about the sort of the scientific critical thinking and secondly they agreed with us that since they think and make their own choices and keep track of all their evidence that was a good part and it's different from a wide rock idea lab where that never really happens. you're just writing stuff down. they were annoyed that they couldn't bypass the storyline. but i actually find that to be somewhat of a plus. i mean it kind of depends. you know, you don't really want people to get right to end and just be able to guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, guess, in a cinch without ever doing anything.
but on the other hand if you had gotten, if you had enough clues that you knew what the mineral was but you hadn't found enough clues in the room according to the game it wouldn't let you out. but you didn't really know that. so, the way the game is set up is that you, if you kind of skip the room you're suppose to be in, cause if there's a lot of hints like what room you should search in next, and if you go to the wrong one or try to skip past it, you just won't find any clues in that room at all. and if you have to go back to the room that you should have been in, find enough, and then they'll let you go. but there's nothing really telling you that. so, if you didn't realize that was happening to you, you could be
in room thinking there must not ever be any clues in here, then later when you go back to it, there were some. and that was quite totally confusing to people. so, i feel like, the fact that you can't bypass the storyline works at some level, but there needs to be there needs to be some kind of alert that tells you why. that tells you what, you know why, you need to find one more clue here before you can go there, don't try it, or something right. (donny) or you're in the wrong room. (eliza) yeah, or something like that. (donny) most games have a turn to [inaudible]. (eliza) yeah, right. so, that was the thing that we sometimes say, should it be a storyline or should it, i mean like in the board game clue, which
of course none of our people had ever played apparently, you know, you can go to any room you want. as long as you roll the right number on the die and get there and then you could start asking your questions and trying to remember how to [inaudible]. but, so if you tried to play this game like that, it doesn't work. but the [inaudible], i don't know, a lot of good games there really is a storyline. you're suppose to follow along. and so it's, okay, i'm ready, let's go. so, that was fun, but yeah, like having an alert that says why you can't be what you are. (donny) there's a random cook in the kitchen. (eliza) yeah, or right, or the head of some other anonymous person pops up. no, go back. they like this.
and then, of course, they complained that it didn't really cover enough minerals for standard curriculum. they couldn't use it in place of what they're doing. and i kind said, yah, to that, because most teachers work in a controlled environment where they are told what to teach and sometimes what day to teach it. and, you know, your students have to know this, this, and this, and there's gonna be a standardized test, which is probably not very well put together that's gonna test later. and we can argue about that all day, but anyway. so, that to me when someone says, look, this doesn't cover enough minerals for my curriculum, then i think, uh-oh, they miss the point, because the point is the process of science not really
you know, giant mineral cataloging all this. that's my philosophy anyway. (q:) but if you included more. there are some minerals that students are gonna identify with more and be really interested in. (eliza) yeah, i also think that, you know, in the next generation, if you made this selection you could say, you know, this is the game you play if you're on the eastern seaboard and we're gonna use a dozen rocks that people see all the time here. whereas if you go out to california there's a different set of stuff you see on
the ground all the time. and that would be original. or you could say to the students, look, or somebody, you know, do this, but with your own mineral or something like that. (elizabeth) i just have to say that if you could get more minerals in there you could also randomize it so every time you played the game it would be different. (eliza) so, that was one of our, that's definitely part of a step too. right now, there's one answer. there's one seed to the program. which means that in a class of 200 people all you have to do is feel like, oh, except for the fact the storyline won't be bypass it.
but i still feel like you can still get by that and cheat and never learn a single thing. but if there's a random seed, the only thing right now that's randomized is that the clues are in different places every time you initialize it. so, it's still like the same minerals in the same room, but that's just clicking around anyway. that was the simplest thing to me like, well, there's still the issue of like the logic puzzle set up. so, we still actually have a little bit of that in here. and that means that putting a random seed in is a little harder than just doing it. because you have to write the clues to make it to work. so, i feel like
a step toward randomcy would be mobile storyline that all work, seven different storylines or something. (q:) did you have a way of making that particular process of identifying the minerals [inaudible] stated? like is there a checklist or something that the students went through or i assume you also covered outside the course? but within the game itself is there some kind of structure to kind of stress that? (eliza) yeah, that's a good point. so, like, so basically what, the way it worked was that when you get a clue it would tell you something
about, you know, we found a mineral here that has a metallic luster. and then if you don't really know which minerals you know the names of the minerals you're trying to describe. but then you go down to the laboratory and you can say, i want to test luster for every mineral here. so, there's a way to do that. [inaudible] yeah, you know you haven't chance to use it. in a real setting yet, but knowing that you're hoped for outcomes that they've learned about the process of science,
what do you envision, or you might not of gotten this far yet, but in how you'll assess whether it did that? (eliza) i mean, at some levels our system is self-reporting. because like, you know, what steps did you take to figure out the answer. and it would also be nice if we database back end that could log how many back and forth they did. you know, like, not on a template, so, i can't remember that clue. so, let me go back there and let me go back here. or if a person really got all the information they could
out of the clues they had at any given juncture. (audience) or even a discussion or even like a self-reflecting like a discussion forum where you ask key questions like, you know, so what did you think about this or what was your strategy for that or you know, and kind of pull out from them that they actually were learning the process. (eliza) i think part of that too, is setting it up the right way. you don't just hand it to them and say, i'll see you in a week. you have to say here is the objective here. so, you're still aware of what you're doing. metaanalysis of this nature has shown
that most students will do trial and error unless they are prompted to do reflective thinking. if they're not prompted they won't do it. they're human beings. and i think with a lot of faculty members, and myself included, there's always this issue at the beginning of like, well, i want them to see the point of it on their own without me having to tell them what the point is. but you can never give away too much. that's one thing i've learned. they won't see the point unless you tell them. and some times they still won't see, so i go ahead tell them. but i think you're right. it's sort of like, lead them to the answer, but not really quite, and then
they're kind of hanging. you can probably even do self-reflection as you go through. you know, hey, it's half-time, what do you think now, blah, blah, blah. it would give them more tasks and things popping up though. it would break the flow of the game, but it could be done. i mean you have to try and balance that out how that happens. you could have it happen naturally within the game. so a character comes up as opposed to just having a pop up window or something like that. so it's actually meshed in deeply. like the same person who tells you to go back because you've jumped ahead too far is also the one that says,
i bet if you look back over the clues you'll find you know more about the kitchen than you thought. yeah, or oh, interesting. just like sherlock holmes, right. and of course, watson, and maybe your character can have a sidekick or something to help you. ooh, i like that. without all the fighting maybe. or maybe the fighting. so, we, i think the simplest thing to do people is to toggle more. [inaudible] and when they're activated they do anything like light up or get bigger or anything like that.
so, even when i went through making screenshots for this talk, i was like, wait now, this is the one that, if i can remember, then [inaudible]. but, you know, this is the first [inaudible]. and like, for example, the little thing down at the bottom. like, what in the world is that, right? like, there's no way to know until the very end that that red light is going to turn green and then you submit. because it's completely inactive up until that point. well, actually it's inactive the whole time because it hasn't been,
but you spend the whole time trying to click there. maybe that's it. (donny) most often programs like word and everything if you let the cursor hang over it, it tells you the title. and that's all you would need. (eliza) that's a good point. like having that gray background glow a little bit white when it was activated. but also be intuitive enough that people would know. considering that it was their first four way into this, you know now, just for the rest of
you, you know, that was our, we had just started this r and d initiative and now we're actually changing that model. so, it's integrating within our learning design group. so, now we actually have hired in the meantime, like three new people who could probably, if it was a year ago, could have have done this with eliza. so it would be interesting though to get those more experienced eyes on it now and say like, because it's a great first step and say, all oh, yeah, you mean the hovering over all. i think they could just take it and run with it. (eliza) probably yeah, which would be pretty cool.
and i think another sort of farther along term idea is that there are a lot of interim science classes that start with a boring classification lab. [inaudible], or fish, or bug. i mean, really, a lot, and so, this framework is selective enough that you could do something like this for a lot of those courses. and it would free up lab time, because it's the kind of thing people can do on their own. but it's just, it's a nice idea, i feel like science classes there's some
[inaudible] in terms of how to make something work online. because we're so worried about the equipment and supervision. and for some not everyone can [inaudible], so you can't do everything absolutely right, but something like this, you can. because it's not that important to have the whole folder in hand really. i mean it is if they're gonna be geoscience major, but then those people aren't in this class. i think there's... (donny) doing a simple reflective work on angel or something with it that's enough information that someone can do a qualitative study on it
and codify it. if you just ask key questions, like you were saying just after they do this. so, that would also the reflection thing, but it would also give you after you do it for a couple of semesters you could code all that information and find some correlations among some sample student body. so, i mean, because i keep thinking about how you would assess with this. how you were gonna do that. and just doing a simple discussion board on angel and stuff like after they do this activity. it's just finding those key questions and then
asking them how to improve it. what are their suggestions? because everybody is gonna come with something different. (eliza) and part of it's a generational thing too i've noticed. (donny) but with angel you can go ahead and find out the demographic of whether they're male, their age group, and then you can go ahead and see the correlation between those also. (elizabeth) i think, also, i don't know if you talked about this, but are you finding that with the games students are doing better, like, on exams, or quizzes, or activities related to minerals? like are they thinking
about it in a different way than they had been before? (eliza) well, i yeah, i mean, at some levels, at least with mineral id and that kind of thing, more work has been done for us by all the csi programs on tv than we could have ever done for ourselves. i mean the idea of analyzing patients is awesome. [laughter] and now, people walking in and they're like, alright. it's not really what geologists do. so, i don't, so, i guess, i don't know, but
where i piloted this, part of the assignment in this lesson on mineralogy was for them to try to make a lot of predictions that was better than rock id. and i think the fact that they went through this game sparked ideas for them. so they started, most of the people who made up the assignments to work with their own students, would do something that involves some kind of csi crime scene around the high school or whatever else. but it involved them having to search clues and identifying the minerals
and things like that. so at some level any amount of critical thinking is good. that is really cool. because i didn't think...you know, you talked about using this in like a gen ed type class, but in your graduate program for teachers how awesome. yeah, that would be totally inspirational. (eliza) yeah, i think that. so, well i hadn't piloted that way. (q:) is this game purpose supposed to be to
to help people to identify certain minerals? i'm sorry, i'm not a science major. most science i ever get is [inaudible]. love that show. i don't even understand it, i just like the show. is it to identify certain minerals or is it to, like, replace a certain curriculum in the future or is it, like, to facilitate people to have more motivation approaching about the minerals? (eliza) you are, at least, knowing how to identify the five minerals that happen to be in here, but the point was really more to teach people
the process that a scientist would go through who doesn't know how to identify minerals. (q:) and this is, i mean, i'm just asking because i'm not really familiar with it, but going through this game process has a better benefit than the, so few would have traditionally of actually identifying a mineral. (eliza) right, well the traditional way that these labs usually are run is that you hand people this big box rocks or minerals and you go through step by step all the ways that you can, all the tests that geologists do. all the ways you'd classify it.
and then hand in two hours later they finally finish performing every test on every mineral. and then you'd spend a lot of time saying, well, some tests are diagnostic right away, you don't have to do the other four, but sometimes you do. and by that time students are like, i've never seen this before in my life. i'll probably never see it again, because it only exists in special museums and [inaudible]. so, then you're kind of thinking to yourself, well, this was a class for non-science majors. you are never again gonna ever have to identify these minerals. so, in this is the philosophy of a lot of the gen eds in our department is that, it's better to teach people
something about how scientists think than about, and along the way they'll learn some content too, hopefully, but really the point is to say, there is a message. people don't just wander around and say, that looks good. and hopefully the game solidifies the idea that there is a method and that science is kind of puzzle when you get the point where you're doing your own tests and not just sitting in lectures. (q:) i just wanted to know, like, if it was a game to help people want to get more motivated and to have people to more engaged science
rather than showing non-science major people this is how the process is. i mean, i thought that, doing a pilot study with graduate students, core science teachers, do those people generally, would like to try something else. i was wondering how the result would be when you have non-science majors, a bunch of them, and try this and not saying, you're gonna do this instead of a class. but you're gonna do this instead of playing [inaudible] or something. i mean will they do that? i mean, will they have the motivation to go back to the game and say, hey this interesting, i want to try that again. or will it be just a game that, it's better
than just reading textbooks, so i'm gonna do this. but, i mean, if there could be certain motivation level that would kind of like, of course, [inaudible], i mean that would be a lot of fun, but if it would arise so that the students will have more interest in it outside of the class a little bit more, could have them more engaged in it. and could have some sort of facilitator for them to actually get into knowing more about identifying minerals. i don't know which class that does that though. (donny) see, the thing is that what i'm understanding what you're trying to say is the best way to go ahead and teach people
is by modeling for them. so, instead of having a teacher trying to inspire and so on and talk them through steps or letting someone just hand them a box and say, here are all the ways to do it. figure out how to do it in the most efficient way. the computer is walking them through the most efficient way to approach it. so, it's giving them a pattern, a model, to follow. whether it be blatant or subconscious they're learning in order of how to do it. so, if they cross this to different platforms, like botany, and different things like that. they'll start to
understand that order of scientific analysis. and then just intuitively start doing it. because like you said, people just don't think about doing things. they're metacognition is not in gear all the time, quite as often. so, that's what they're doing. they just, they start to learn patterns. our minds are built that way. so, this builds towards that. (q:) if that's used in a classroom, then what will be the teachers role in the classroom then? (donny) the person who says, oh, you can't figure this out, let me help you. so, it's one of those things like how she was saying having the person go back and do it. sometimes you have to have a teacher go ahead and say, you have go
i don't understand where i'm going. so, it has to be able to flag the teacher. because, you know, people have their different areas of, i guess, it's called, in learning to recall zone of approximal development. that area...yeah, so, that area sometimes you just need help. and sometimes people aren't intuitive like she was saying with the controls to figure them out. so, that's where, oh, you have an instructor to help and stuff like that. (audience) helping with the reflection. guiding the reflection. setting it up and guiding the reflection. (q:) my question is how can you integrate macro
issue into this? so, you were saying that you want students to be engaged with like after class and go back to it. and kind of the way to do that is just show them why are minerals important, like why should i care? instead of like, hey, all those people brought a rock to this party. like, hey, these people brought these rocks to this party for this reason and like, these minerals are really cool and like, these are the places in your life you'll see this. like, forms you'll connect in and then be like, oh, i'm learning science, but there's also this other cool way. (audience) practical, like, even though i'm a non-science major this actually relates to my life. (eliza) for some of them i feel like that is, sort of, where
the instructor comes in. at least in this zone of the game. it's not... this game isn't designed to be everything to everybody. it's a little piece of one part of eleven. (elizabeth) i think one interesting follow-up to this could be something like, you have a story where someone brings you a sample and you use the process here to figure out if it's really that mineral or not. (eliza) yeah, yeah, yeah! right, right. another activity i was thinking about
was is that...we understand there's a certain process of rocks, or minerals, that now maybe another follow-up might be is, okay, what are interested in and how would help someone determine what it is? so, someone loves cars, right, how do you identify certain types of cars, right, just on the road playing a game? the fastest person to identify the car driving ahead of you. how do you do that? well, you look at the grill, you look at the shape, you look at this and that. is it a sedan? is it a truck, whatever? things like that, that other people might not think of. that you can think up of a quick, you know, just a quick
checklist or something to say, hey, this is what i'm interested in. helping to make that transfer known. helping them apply that reflection again and helping them make it relevant. (elizabeth) i've never heard from the remote viewers. so, is there anyone that has a question over either the phone or in chatroom, i forgot to mention that earlier. so, if you do, just either speak up or type. i thought that, i mean, i guess, i'm from my department is [inaudible] education, so that's why i'm thinking about from a teachers perspective. and i'm stuck thinking, like, you know,
that's why i was asking about what's the teacher's role, what will the teacher be doing. if the teachers just basically monitoring and then guiding them through certain things, i mean, that wouldn't require a lot of teacher education. i mean, there should be. but still, i mean, it's more about how to navigate the game, what they would be going through. but if you have something like, if you sort of gamify the classroom. for example, if you have places where students can just use a certain hashtag of a game and then keep on tweeting about it on their twitter. and the teacher could have a chance to monitor the hashtag, like a tweet chat, and go through the same things to see certain patterns, what students think about, or like,
where students are stuck or where students are struggling. teachers can actually see that during the class and try to incorporate that into later part of the class where the students usually have struggles or go over again with extra explanations. yeah, i might be stepping on something totally different. (donny) no, but that's a great way to go about that and analyze it later. (eliza) i think it could work in a flipped classroom too. because the teacher could set them up and have them do this and come back and then reflect and give them some other hands-on thing in the classroom to see if they materialize.
oh, yeah, yeah! (chris) i think that's where having a database would help. you can see, well, seventy percent of the class got this one wrong and clearly something is not right. i can talk about that now and see as a faculty member. i'm curious, how long is the experience that you guys designed for? is it suppose to be a twenty minute thing or a two hour game? (eliza) i think it took, well, this took, this took about an hour. is that comparable to what it took when you did the different version, but
very similar like in your classroom? (eliza) well, i see a normal app time is about two hours here. so, it was a two hour lab? (eliza) yeah, i think it took, yeah, i'm trying to think, even the people who they knew were slow basically could get it down in the two hours. (elizabeth) does this game include any type of tutorial explaining the test? (eliza) no, not really, not yet. there's a beginning part that just
has the storyline. [silence] yeah, so it doesn't really explain the points yet. (elizabeth) did we get any? (donny) no one has, no one sent any text questions. i've been watching. the interesting thing is, this could probably even be applicable to younger students and its formats and actually leaving out objectives would be more beneficial to younger students.
because they just don't have the maturity level usually to focus on an objective or understand the purpose or anything like that. so, it's a good idea. well, you could try to make it into an app. so that younger kids could just have it hands on. and now that they... i some article that nowadays the ipad exceeded the amount of computers they have in schools. so, you know, you're likely gonna see an ipad rather than laptop nowadays in a school. (donny) the state of florida has gone totally ebook.
and there they're gonna transition over the next decade that every textbook will be replaced to an ebook. they've wrote it into law. and then most schools are going to ebooks. so, you're gonna have some type of tablet. you're gonna have a tablet. having it as in an app would be actually a fun idea. yeah, that would be good. and you can have like different seasons of it. try to get out of the classroom. well, i just learned flash and now everyone has [inaudible]. i have a question for this group. i assume most of you, is it right assuming most of your are affiliated with
gaming commons? no, you're just people from all over the institution, i mean i know a lot of you, interested in this topic? yeah, well i know you are. because my question is, you know, so, a faculty member like eliza wants to do something like this or she's got this great, i hate it being called prototype, because it's more advanced than that, but her programmers moved away and whatever, we're lucky, we have resources within our institute where eliza is to help her. but what about...
what if you didn't? is the gaming commons a place somebody goes or do they just put a help wanted sign up and say? (donny) um, instructional design. they have design studios where they teach students to actually develop apps and different items like this and to actually go ahead and hook up database applications to learn analytics. so, find an [inaudible] professor who might want students working on a project. (donny) and actually dr. hooper, simon hooper, he does design studio. it's something, you go ahead, and they're learning
databases and different things like. the project where you could give them over and someone could take over. (eliza) yeah, that's cool. i've always thought part of this, once we got the end product, it was jeff showing me how to do. and to me that was a good enough outcome for whatever you produce. because for me, i could program it myself, but that's not fun if you can teach a student to do it. no, i love that idea. because we could do it in house. and eliza's right she is no slouch when it comes to
programming herself. but i love that idea of being able to keep getting students involved. (donny) yeah, and the thing is once you get the database and the analytics set up, you can change the front end anyway you want. you could even get in visual art students in the art department to go ahead and do that who are learning html. so, i mean you could cross platforms over all disciplines. well, and that's when you were talking about the different platforms i would think that ideally it would be html based or you know, something web based. so that you can use it on any device. that would be
everything, you know, this in not my field, but everything, instructional design is, but not gaming, but everything i've read says, yeah, shoot for that. don't shoot for like, ios, because you're limiting yourself too much. (elizabeth) another resource, interns are always a good resource, but, especially for someone who's sort of interested in learning more anyway is lynda.com. because it's got lots of free tutorials. oh, for that person to learn. because i had an instructor who had some really great ideas.
that eventually pointed them to that. yeah, that's a great resource for all of us. (chris) to follow up on your question, we do do development for faculty members. we do have kind of a limited [inaudible]. we submitted this one and it got rejected. not because of lack of love. i assure you. we thought is was an awesome idea. (chris) it is a fantastic idea. we just have limited resources. yeah, limited resources. no, i totally understand. (chris) one of the things that we want to be able to do as well as is submit grants too and help people find places. so, if you wanted to turn more programmers.
(elizabeth) especially in terms of getting grants is if he can think of a way that it's not just solving this one educational problem. like we talked about we take this framework and write a story where you're looking for car parts. (donny) across disciplines, but that's where the learning analytics need to come in. you need some type of qualitative or quantitative data for it. (chris) i think the idea of critical thinking in a broader stand of science is gold. i mean there's so many [inaudible]. any other questions?
(chris) this isn't a question, but once everything is linked up in the next version and you have databases, could you imagine sort of giving students feedback when they submit? so, here's what i think my answers are. does it go in and then graded based on that, or do they get kicked back and say, nope, this isn't right? (eliza) i mean i hadn't really thought about what i was exactly how it was gonna be graded because... it could be more in the reflection and that would be perfectly acceptable. (eliza) yeah, at some level i'm hoping for
a way to login and immediately accept. because it would be interesting to be able to even give you a feedback while they're going through it. it'd be like you are not very good at picking out all the information that you could kind of thing, or you know, something like that. and i feel like, that's, i guess, i was thinking more of a reflection grade. but i was sort of hoping that at least part of their grade would be on whether they solved it or not. it's a little bit like, it's a little bit like
more like a crossword puzzle than like sudoku. because if you get one thing, but you don't catch right away, you may as well just throw it out, because there's no way that you could possibly go back and trace the first one you got wrong or something else. in the end all you have is the gird numbers anyway. it's not a meaningful work, whereas with a crossword puzzle you can always figure out like your mistake. and i feel like this is like a logic puzzle. it's pretty hard to, you'd have to be wrong in sort of multiple ways to
compliment each other perfectly to not get it right at the end. or else you've just given up. so, at some level i think everyone in the pilot ends up with the right answer at the end. defining what your learning outcomes are upfront and then that's what you grade. (eliza) i just figured, well, once this thing gets finally built, and there's the ability to track different things, then i might realize that the interesting thing to track is a different thing than i thought. (donny) so, the only thing is when you do the back end database then that means you have to do it on a broad spectrum.
but like he was saying twitter, or using angel to do a board discussion. if you want go ahead and do it that way then you get a qualitative coding in that any do what you're talking about, picking and choosing. but this is the perfect time to do that is in this developmental stage. you've already been doing it. you're already pulled out and coded different things. so, how to improve it and so on. i believe you're on the right track. and sometimes even something simple
for a little clock that would say every elapsed time of x, we're gonna, the database is gonna record how much of your little chart you filled in yet and sort of benchmark against how much he does. they didn't have to reflect on directly or they got in this length of time. or how much their chart is filled in compared to the number of clues. i guess i just keep going back to the learning
outcomes, your general one is that they learned to process then you can start thinking, well, then does that matter? does time matter? because that would be interesting, but it doesn't mean you aren't getting it, it just means that you're slower. (elizabeth) is there an opportunity for some sort of follow-up activity? what are some of the identified techniques used to identify minerals or something like that? see if they're kind of observing that. (eliza) or even some kind of
pre and post that doesn't necessarily involve minerals, but identifying something else like leaves or tree bark. and try and see if this game helps them be more efficient at tasks like that later because they've internalized it. one of the things i started thinking about was the trouble i have in the games that we've done before when you want to tell them when they've done something wrong. because they could get to the very end, i know you said that they're locked out of certain rooms but
you want to tell them they clicked wrong button and it's, nope, right away, you did it wrong or do you let them get to the very end and say, like, somewhere there is a mistake and go find it. i don't know that i have the right answer to that. because it does depend. i think in some courses i taught if you wait too long to help somebody realize that they're going down the wrong path, that person ends up solidifying their perception with outliers to get rid of later. but if you catch them right away. then you're just holding their hand.
there's a balance to that and i don't know if there's a right answer. (donny) that's the thing you can go ahead and track a database and you can develop in a later end where to put those key elements in to flag someone and stop them from going down the wrong path and going down. and like i said, you can flag a teacher if it's being used in a classroom to come over and say, hey, how are you doing? is everything okay? and if they're fine they're fine, but if not and they're getting a little frustrated, the teacher can step in and help them. but it can always set into this.
someone said, correction or hint. oh, chris was saying, so instead of saying [sound] you're wrong, maybe you give them a hint, like, well, you might want to rethink that. what about blah. i think that's what they mean. (chris) i'm not saying your wrong, but you're wrong. yeah, really. (elizabeth) there are games where they actually, their way of correcting you, like, if it's a thermo dynamics game, like, your correction maybe your virtual engine blows up or something. they like let the worse possible
thing happen. it's a good way to remember what not to do. (eliza) and that was like two and a half of my work. yeah, and nobody gets it. you can't get people to play board games anymore. you can't get people to sit around the table. well, and you know, to go back to at the very beginning eliza shared that the names aren't copyrighted. i have to be honest with you all, you know, when i saw the first prototype, they were fairly far along, and i panicked because you know eliza wasn't in the room so i was just in the room with these young, you know, not very
experienced, and i'm like, did you guys think about copyright. because i don't think, you know, so it was very relieving. (eliza) they spent a long time verifying that that was true. boy was i surprised, actually. yeah, because the first time i mentioned i remember they were like, ugh. but then they were like, oh, yeah, actually it's cool. we don't have to change a thing. and it wouldn't have been hard to change their names and so forth. it still would have worked. (eliza) they were like trying to get non-scandalous people. so, first they were like, we can't use ben roethlisberger. how about troy polamalu, he's never been in trouble. i was like, maybe we could just go for
not humans. tiger woods....lance armstrong (eliza) maybe we should start going for people who like everyone knows they've been in trouble the whole time and there's no question anymore. make them the bad guy. mean joe green (donny) but the whole thing, that would be a great way to introduce across disciplines if you used the guy from animal planet. you know, the one who and you use different characters, steve irwin,
people from different characters. oh, yeah, that would be neat. i think using real people is a bad idea. (elizabeth) well then you get into rights about did celebrities give you permission. well, you know, and the thing is does it really matter that they don't know clue? like, i thought, it was so cute because it was based on clue. but if you didn't know clue, like my fourteen year old would still get it, and still think it was fun, i think. (donny) yeah, i still have friends that are
in college who know clue and they play clue. it's just they didn't set up mystery theaters. there are still people who do it. (chris) it might be better that they don't remember. because then they're not going all, well, this is like clue and the graphics aren't as good. and the next time they play clue that's just like eliza's movie. we're out of time. if there aren't any other questions.
(donny) greg said, sorry, had to go. love the game. this was great. thank you very much. [applause] [idle chatter] go eat some pizza. i highly recommend the one with the tomatoes on. is there virtual pizza?