Quest Atlantis: Advancing a Socially-Responsive, Meta-Game for Learning

他的项目继续致力于建立一个多用户的虚拟环境，被称为探索亚特兰蒂斯，这是学术上有价值的，游戏一样，并从事小学生在社会反应的做法。该基金将进行一系列自然主义的研究和实验操作，以促进多用户虚拟环境设计方面的理论和实践知识，以支持科学学习。具体来说，该项目将测试三个假设：第一，学生学习学术内容的社会响应游戏环境中将学到更多的东西，比那些学习通过教学方法，没有明确有一个游戏组件。研究的这一部分还将考察游戏环境是否同样有效，如果学术任务的难度不同，或者在学习和游戏的平衡之间是否有必要的平衡。 第二，参与者，尤其是女孩，将实现和学习更多，更参与时，他们的参与是位于一个性别平衡，社会反应的游戏环境，而不是男性主导的，或只是一个游戏环境没有明确的社会议程。 第三，如果环境利用基于社区的元素，而不是只支持单一用户参与，那么参与游戏环境的学生将实现，学习和更多参与。 该项目还将对所有条件下的参与进行定性描述，特别是社会反应游戏条件，以了解来自不同社会经济群体和不同性别的儿童如何参与并理解元游戏背景下的集体体验。

his project continues work to build a multi-user virtual environment,known as Quest Atlantis, that is academically valuable, game like, andthat engages elementary students in socially-responsive practices. Thisgrant will undertake a series of naturalistic studies and experimentalmanipulations that will advance theoretical and practical knowledge withrespect to the design of multi-user virtual environments for supportingscience learning. Specifically, the project will test three hypotheses:First, that students learning academic content within asocially-responsive gaming context will learn more and be more engagedthan those learning through teaching methods that do not explicitly havea gaming component. This portion of the study will also examine if thegaming context works will work equally well if the academic tasks varyin difficulty or if there is some necessary balance between the amountof learning and playing. Second, participants, especially girls, willachieve and learn more and be more engaged when their participation issituated in a gender-balanced, socially-responsive gaming context asopposed to a male-dominated one, or simply a gaming context without anexplicit social agenda. Third, students participating in a gamingenvironment will achieve, learn and be more engaged if the environmentleverages a community-based element than if it just supports single-userparticipation. The project will also produce qualitative accounts ofparticipation in all conditions, but especially the socially-responsivegaming condition so as to understand how children from differentsocio-economic groups and of different genders come to participate inand make sense of the collective experience of the meta-game context.