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

他的项目继续致力于建立一个名为Quest Atlantis的多用户虚拟环境，它具有学术价值，类似于游戏，并吸引小学生参与社会响应实践。该基金将进行一系列的自然主义研究和实验操作，这将促进理论和实践知识，以支持科学学习的多用户虚拟环境的设计。具体来说，该项目将测试三个假设：首先，在社交响应游戏环境中学习学术内容的学生将比那些通过没有明确包含游戏成分的教学方法学习的学生学得更多，更投入。研究的这一部分还将检验游戏环境是否同样有效，如果学术任务的难度不同，或者在学习和玩的数量之间是否存在一些必要的平衡。其次，当参与者（尤其是女孩）的参与处于一个性别平衡、社会响应的游戏环境中，而不是男性主导的游戏环境中，或者仅仅是一个没有明确社交议程的游戏环境中，她们就会获得更多成就、学到更多东西，并更投入其中。第三，如果环境能够利用基于社区的元素，而不是只支持单个用户的参与，那么参与游戏环境的学生将能够获得成就、学习并更加投入。该项目还将产生所有条件下参与的定性描述，尤其是社会反应性游戏条件，以便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.