Visiting schools
Published November 11th, 2009
Category
By Tsu Ting Huang
Last year, people in CREATE, NYU (including PIs, Post-docs, and RAs) conducted a pilot study in a middle school of Staten Island to test out research methods, such as equipment settings or interview questions. We went to the school observing kids playing various games (like Xbox, PS3, DSL, or computer games) once a week for about two months. After several times of failure and retry, this year, we are visiting more than one schools in New York per week with a complete set of equipment and questions to explore the values of video games.
Doing research in schools is fun, especially doing game research. There are always unexpected incidents because children are usually less sophisticated than adults. Sometimes, while playing video games, we might focus on accomplishing the goals provided by the main storyline, like saving princess in Super Mario or finding out the secret of village in Professor Layton, because we just want to know the story or gain mastery to defeat the big guy in the end. We then might neglect the joy that resides in sub-plots or interaction with things that looks irrelevant.
For instance, Srcibblenauts is a new DSL game that requires players to spell and write down vocabularies to solve problems. A simple task would be like “give a cook what he/she needs to cook”. The answer could be pan, knife, spatula or any other cooking tools. I personally like this game because it allows creative and multiple solutions to a problem. But I was amazed by two girls who played this game for the first time. After playing it regularly for a while, they accidentally found out that they could knock out computer characters using a stop sign. The computer characters actually only function as informants in this game. They became crazy about killing and tried various ways to kill the character. But, the most interesting thing was, the computer character would actually fight back (like grab the stop sign from you) and knock you out! This brought them the greatest joy I’ve seen during the observation.
For now, I think visiting these schools is like exploring in an open-ended game. Unexpected things happen all the time. Every researcher has his/her way to find answers to questions, and each children is the key informant who gives us valuable information to reach our goals, which is to unfold the educaitonal power of these artificial worlds.
