Game-A-Palooza Craig G Anderson, John Binzak, Lauren Wielgus, Jennifer Dalsen, Mark Stenerson, Sheri Ebert, Julia Robinson, David Azari, Laura Bloker, Pasqueline Scaico, Robert Bohanen, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler
Pairing games with education has been attempted many times with the hopes that the engaging nature of games will fuel student learning. However, these attempts often fall short of their goals by either losing student interest as soon as the game is forced into the classroom or because the game does not adequately promote learning of the desired material. Maintaining student interest while keeping learning goals on track has proven to be non-trivial. In an attempt to achieve these goals, we at GLS created an informal learning event called Game-A-Palooza in which students participated in 3 curricula designed around 5 educational games. Each game was created as a stand-alone learning tool and the curricula were designed to supplement the materials embedded in them. From these games and curricula, we obtained multiple data streams spanning quantitative click-stream data of each player’s game behaviors to talk audio data during each session to physical artifacts created by the players during sessions. Through this symposium, we will detail the design of each curriculum, the data streams that were collected, plans for analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data, challenges of creating the event, and future directions.
