iWorld

About iWorld

Video games are traditionally viewed as an enjoyable pastime for elementary school students, but building video games can be both engaging and also provide a learning opportunity for these students—as well as a research opportunity for understanding embodied cognition. In particular, the iWorld team is evaluating how children externalize their understanding of programming concepts.  To elicit this understanding, the students are provided with opportunities to demonstrate, either through the simulation of their bodies (full simulation) or the use of an external agent (surrogate simulation), what actions, decisions, and consequences result from a variety of code samples.  Using Scratch, a group of 4th-grade students in an after-school program are creating their own games while being introduced to:

• The different aspects of game design, such as goals, challenges, and plot, using storyboarding and character-design exercises.

• Such programming elements as loops, variables, conditionals, and operators, first as they reproduce pre-defined programming scripts and then as they develop their own games. 

• Grade-level appropriate algebraic concepts that are integrated into the game design and development process. 

• Teamwork, as they participate in collaborative development sessions where discussion is encouraged.

• Opportunities to explore different artistic areas, including interactive art and music.

The research agenda for the Fall 2008 semester has been to explore the algebraic understanding of these 4th graders as they develop their video games.  We are using pre-defined scripts to evaluate if the students are able to identify Cartesian coordinates within a sample program, as well as pre-post tests to evaluate their level of understanding of grade-level appropriate mathematical content.  We are also evaluating the students’ ability to create artifacts (in this instance, actions as they relate to the Scratch “stage”) based on text-based instructions, and hope to explore “far transfer” of the concepts covered during class to mathematical word problems and simple algebra problem sets.