Computer Game Design: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Addressing Underrepresentation in Computing

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This Fostering Interdisciplinary Research on Education (FIRE) project targets a complex STEM education issue of national significance regarding the lack of girls and minorities choosing to study advanced computing. The goal is to help change the current status by engaging participants in computational thinking (CT) to help prepare them to not just be users, but producers of technology. The focus is on computer game programming/game authoring.This interdisciplinary team pairs a developmental psychologist from a non-profit organization with educational researchers, computer scientists, and graduate students from the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) to develop, test, and study computer game authoring tools with 140 middle school girls and minorities in four local schools. A UCSC associate professor of computer science with expertise in transforming game design, as well as mentoring women in computer science, mentors the PI through one-on-one sessions, structured professional development, and research. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the PI will pursue professional development through five undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science and interact with other team members and industry affiliates to learn about computational media, gaming and interactive storytelling, software engineering, computational modeling of language and gestures, digital arts, and animation. Within this immersive environment, the PI also will conduct research to acquire skills and knowledge that crosses disciplinary boundaries between social science, education, and computer science and share expertise in child development, social science, and educational research methodologies.The five-phase research study uses CT as the framework to develop, test, and refine the game authoring tools. During these phases, qualitative and quantitative methods will capture and analyze research data to reveal what kinds of computer games girls and minorities like to create and whether game authoring builds computational thinking. The following research questions will be investigated:(1) How can we strengthen or create new game authoring tools that truly engage middle school students in computational thinking?(2) Is a game authoring tool that allows students to create character, narrative, and dynamic relationships more engaging for girls and minorities than a tool without these features?