Play or science?: a study of learning and framing in crowdscience games

Crowdscience games may hold unique potentials as learning opportunities compared to games made for fun or education. They are part of an actual science problem solving process: By playing, players help scientists, and thereby interact with real continuous research processes. This mixes the two worlds of play and science in new ways. During usability testing we discovered that users of the crowdscience game Quantum Dreams tended to answer questions in game terms, even when directed explicitly to give science explanations.We then examined these competing frames of understanding through a mixed correlational and grounded theory analysis. This essay presents the core ideas of crowdscience games as learning opportunities, and reports how a group of players used "game", "science" and "conceptual" frames to interpret their experience. Our results suggest that oscillating between the frames instead of sticking to just one led to the largest number of correct science interpretations, as players could participate legitimately and autonomously at multiple levels of understanding.

[1]  J. McGonigal.  Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World , 2011 .

[2]  G. Fine.  Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds , 1983 .

[3]  Bernard Suits,et al.  The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia , 1978 .

[4]  Charlene Jennett,et al.  Do games attract or sustain engagement in citizen science?: a study of volunteer motivations , 2013, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[5]  Avi Kaplan,et al.  Patterns of Adaptive Learning Survey--Short Version , 2013 .

[6]  P. Wouters,et al.  A meta-analysis of the cognitive and motivational effects of serious games , 2013 .

[7]  Gary Bente,et al.  Why so serious? On the relation of serious games and learning , 2010, Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture.

[8]  E. Deci,et al.  Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions. , 2000, Contemporary educational psychology.

[9]  D. Kuhn.  Education for Thinking , 1986, Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education.

[10]  Rikke Magnussen,et al.  Games as a Platform for Student Participation in Authentic Scientific Research. , 2014, 1511.01653.

[11]  J. Dewey.  Logic, the theory of inquiry , 1938 .

[12]  J. Dewey.  Experience and Education , 1938 .

[13]  Berit S. Haug.  Inquiry-Based Science: Turning Teachable Moments into Learnable Moments , 2014 .

[14]  E. Goffman.  Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience , 1974 .

[15]  Tim Fields,et al.  Mobile & Social Game Design: Monetization Methods and Mechanics, Second Edition , 2014 .

[16]  B. Sutton-Smith,et al.  The Study of Games , 1971 .

[17]  Mads Kock Pedersen,et al.  Exploring the quantum speed limit with computer games , 2015, Nature.

[18]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[19]  Sebastian Deterding,et al.  The Game Frame: Systemizing a Goffmanian Approach to Video Game Theory [Extended Abstract] , 2009, DiGRA Conference.

[20]  K. Squire.  From Content to Context: Videogames as Designed Experience , 2006 .

[21]  Otto Chrons,et al.  Digitalkoot: Making Old Archives Accessible Using Crowdsourcing , 2011, Human Computation.

[22]  Clay Shirky.  Tapping the cognitive surplus , 2010 .

[23]  C. Lintott,et al.  Galaxy Zoo: Motivations of Citizen Scientists , 2008, 1303.6886.

[24]  Wilfried Admiraal,et al.  Mobile game-based learning in secondary education: engagement, motivation and learning in a mobile city game , 2009, J. Comput. Assist. Learn..

[25]  Michael S. Horn,et al.  The Right Kind of Wrong: A “Knowledge in Pieces” Approach to Science Learning in Museums , 2013 .

[26]  Frank Allan Hansen,et al.  Can Autobiographical Memories Create Better Learning ? The Case of a Scary Game , 2011 .

[27]  Lesandro Ponciano,et al.  Volunteers' Engagement in Human Computation for Astronomy Projects , 2014, Computing in Science & Engineering.

[28]  Karen J Hoare PhD Senior,et al.  Sifting, sorting and saturating data in a grounded theory study of information use by practice nurses: A worked example , 2012 .

[29]  Juho Hamari,et al.  Player Types: A Meta-synthesis , 2014, Trans. Digit. Games Res. Assoc..

[30]  Thierry Paul,et al.  Quantum computation and quantum information , 2007, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science.

[31]  Andrew K. Przybylski,et al.  The Motivational Pull of Video Games: A Self-Determination Theory Approach , 2006 .

[32]  David A. Huffaker,et al.  Understanding the Meta-experience of Casual Games , 2012 .

[33]  Mads Kock Pedersen,et al.  Getting Humans to do Quantum Optimization - User Acquisition, Engagement and Early Results from the Citizen Cyberscience Game Quantum Moves , 2014, Hum. Comput..

[34]  S. Hewa.  Medical technology: A pandora's box? , 1994, The Journal of medical humanities.

[35]  Dennis Charsky,et al.  From Edutainment to Serious Games: A Change in the Use of Game Characteristics , 2010, Games Cult..

[36]  James A. Hutchby,et al.  Limits to binary logic switch scaling - a gedanken model , 2003, Proc. IEEE.

[37]  Jacob F. Sherson,et al.  Quantum computation architecture using optical tweezers , 2011 .

[38]  Jesper Juul,et al.  A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players , 2009 .

[39]  O. Dreĭer,et al.  Learning in Personal Trajectories of Participation , 2011 .

[40]  J. Huizinga.  Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture , 1938 .

[41]  Jeffrey Cass.  With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830 , 2007 .

[42]  J. Raessens.  Playful Identities, or the Ludification of Culture , 2006, Games Cult..

[43]  Susan J. Avery,et al.  When Opportunity Knocks: Opening the Door Through Teachable Moments , 2008 .

[44]  Adrien Treuille,et al.  Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game , 2010, Nature.

[45]  J. Gliem,et al.  Calculating, Interpreting, And Reporting Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficient For Likert-Type Scales , 2003 .