"What else can I do?" Examining the Impact of Community Data on Adaptation and Quality of Reflection in an Educational Game

"What else can I do?" Examining the Impact of Community Data on Adaptation and Quality of Reflection in an Educational Game

"What else can I do?" Examining the Impact of Community Data on Adaptation and Quality of Reflection in an Educational Game

Erica Kleinman, Jennifer Villareale, Murtuza N. Shergadwala, Zhaoqing Teng, Andy Bryant, Jichen Zhu, Magy Seif El-Nasr

Abstract

"Adaptation, or ability and willingness to consider an alternative approach, is a critical component of learning through reflection, especially in educational games, where there are often multiple avenues to success. As a domain, educational games have shown increased interest in using retrospective visualizations to promote and support reflection. Such visualizations, which can facilitate comparison with peer data, may also have an impact on adaptation in educational games. This has, however, not been empirically examined within the domain. In this work, we examine how comparison with other players’ data influenced adaptation, a part of reflection, in the context of a game that teaches parallel programming. Our results indicate that comparison with peers does significantly impact willingness to try a different approach, but suggest that there may also be other ways. We discuss what these results mean for future use of retrospective visualizations in educational games and present opportunities for future work."

Reference

Kleinman, E., Villareale, J., Shergadwala, M. N., Teng, Z., Bryant, A., Zhu, J., & El-Nasr, M. S. (2023, April). " What else can I do?" Examining the Impact of Community Data on Adaptation and Quality of Reflection in an Educational Game. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12). https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3544548.3580664

Keywords

Adaptation, Educational Games, Retrospective Visualizations