CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Learning Maker Skills By Building Game Props

制造设备，如激光切割机和3D打印机，使普通人能够制造自己的实物。这些工具正在推动创新和创业。然而，制造设备的日益普及与教育水平的提高并不相关。制造商正在创造的许多设计都存在实用性、耐用性和可靠性问题。解决这个问题的一个有希望的群体是有潜力成为下一代工程师和创新者的年轻学习者。该项目通过游戏向高中和本科学习者探索制作技能。虚拟物理游戏的最新进展使玩家能够在游戏中使用物理道具。例如，由纸板和传感器制成的物理鱼竿由玩家投下，以获取游戏中的虚拟鱼。虽然今天这些物理道具被用来增加沉浸感，但它们还没有被用于教学。有了这个奖项的资助，研究小组调查如何建立一个物理游戏道具的行为可以用来教玩家制造，电子和编程技能。这项研究将帮助我们了解哪些技能可以通过游戏有效地传授，以及设计师如何利用游戏机制创造沉浸式游戏玩法来促进学习。该项目将开发和发布作为开源的一套游戏，以获得制造技能。它将吸引不同的高中生、本科生、制造实验室和创客空间社区作为教育游戏的共同开发者和用户。随着游戏的开发，研究人员将利用他们在制造和教育社区内的网络来宣传游戏，并将游戏整合到其他环境中，从学校到夏令营到社区组织。通过结合学习科学、教育游戏设计、人机交互和基于设计的研究文献的方法，本研究将进行一个迭代设计过程，以调查：(1)通过访谈、背景调查和景观分析，将技能和概念与游戏机制相结合，以教授新的制作任务的知识地图；(2)设计和评估创客学习游戏的理论和原则，包括记录用户与游戏互动的机制，如点击分析、任务间隔时间和游戏内用户反馈；(3)通过混合方法的用户研究，比较培训前和培训后的学习收益，并得出定性和定量结果，对评估学习者知识和经验增长的影响；(4)游戏制作基础设施，以促进活动从一个游戏转移到另一个游戏，并扩大创客学习概念的适用性。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Fabrication devices, such as laser cutters and 3D printers, enable ordinary people to fabricate their own physical objects. These tools are driving innovation and entrepreneurship. However, rising availability of fabrication devices does not correlate to a rise in education. Many designs that makers are creating suffer from practicality, durability, and reliability issues. One promising group for addressing this problem is young learners who have the potential to become the next generation of engineers and innovators. This project explores teaching skills for fabrication to high school and undergraduate learners through games. Recent advances in virtual-physical game play enable players to use physical props in a game. For instance, a physical fishing rod made from cardboard and sensors is cast by the player to acquire virtual fish in the game. While today these physical props are used to increase immersion, they are not yet used for teaching. With the funding from this award, the team of researchers investigate how the act of building a physical game prop can be used to teach players fabrication, electronics, and programming skills. This research will provide insights into what skills can be effectively taught through games and how designers can leverage game mechanisms to create immersive game play to facilitate learning. The project will develop and release as open source a suite of games for acquiring fabrication skills. It will engage diverse high school students, undergraduate students, and fabrication lab and makerspace communities as co-developers and users of the educational games. As games are developed, the researchers will use their network within the fabrication and educational communities to publicize and integrate the games into additional environments, from schools to summer camps to community organizations. By combining methods from the learning sciences, educational game design, human-computer interaction, and design-based research literature, this research will conduct an iterative design process to investigate: (1) knowledge maps connecting skills and concepts that can be integrated with game mechanics to teach new fabrication tasks, through conducting interviews, contextual inquiries, and landscape analyses; (2) theory and principles for designing and evaluating maker-learning games, including mechanisms for recording user interaction with the game, such as click analysis, time between tasks, and in-game user feedback; (3) implications for evaluating learners’ increases in knowledge and experiences, through mixed methods user studies that compare pre- and post-training learning gain and result in qualitative and quantitative findings; and (4) a game-fabrication infrastructure to facilitate the transfer of activities from one game to another and broaden the applicability of the maker-learning concept.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.