Reimagining Game Design

Is it possible to design a video game that will fit into youth gaming culture, yet implicitly teach valued science content? This is certainly an ambition and challenging question, however the potential benefit of success necessitates action and requires a reimagining of educational games design. In this project I explore, create, and assess design principles that can be integrated into the design of popular commercial video games enabling players to connect intuitive experiences of encountered science content developed from interactions with the game, to real world and formally-taught instances of the science content. While this work has implications for exploring a variety of different STEM topics via video games, two domains are used as test-cases: kinematics and the particulate nature of matter--domains that have been shown to be difficult to learn in formal settings. Explored designs were targeted for children ages 8-13 and were used in informal play environments.

Published research on FormulaT Racing and Particles! can be found on the Publications page.