Building Systems from Scratch: An Exploratory Study of Students Learning about Climate Change
Saved in:
| Title: | Building Systems from Scratch: An Exploratory Study of Students Learning about Climate Change |
|---|---|
| Language: | English |
| Authors: | Puttick, Gillian (ORCID |
| Source: | Journal of Science Education and Technology. Aug 2018 27(4):306-321. |
| Availability: | Springer. Available from: Springer Nature. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-348-4505; e-mail: customerservice@springernature.com; Web site: https://link.springer.com/ |
| Peer Reviewed: | Y |
| Page Count: | 16 |
| Publication Date: | 2018 |
| Sponsoring Agency: | National Science Foundation (NSF) |
| Contract Number: | 1542954 |
| Document Type: | Journal Articles Reports - Research |
| Education Level: | Middle Schools |
| Descriptors: | Climate, Systems Building, Workshops, Middle School Students, Females, Programming, Visualization, Video Games, Design, Qualitative Research, Science Process Skills, Learning Experience, Design Preferences, Science Activities, Hands on Science, Teaching Methods, Student Satisfaction |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10956-017-9725-x |
| ISSN: | 1059-0145 |
| Abstract: | Science and computational practices such as modeling and abstraction are critical to understanding the complex systems that are integral to climate science. Given the demonstrated affordances of game design in supporting such practices, we implemented a free 4-day intensive workshop for middle school girls that focused on using the visual programming environment, Scratch, to design games to teach others about climate change. The experience was carefully constructed so that girls of widely differing levels of experience were able to engage in a cycle of game design. This qualitative study aimed to explore the representational choices the girls made as they took up aspects of climate change systems and modeled them in their games. Evidence points to the ways in which designing games about climate science fostered emergent systems thinking and engagement in modeling practices as learners chose what to represent in their games, grappled with the realism of their respective representations, and modeled interactions among systems components. Given the girls' levels of programming skill, parts of systems were more tractable to create than others. The educational purpose of the games was important to the girls' overall design experience, since it influenced their choice of topic, and challenged their emergent understanding of climate change as a systems problem. |
| Abstractor: | As Provided |
| Number of References: | 80 |
| Entry Date: | 2018 |
| Accession Number: | EJ1182432 |
| Database: | ERIC |
|
Full text is not displayed to guests.
Login for full access.
|
|
| FullText | Links: – Type: pdflink Url: https://content.ebscohost.com/cds/retrieve?content=AQICAHj0k_4E0hTGH8RJwT4gCJyBsGNe_WN95AvKlDbXJGqwxwEDvEQgw5aiJKXYliVPuuqfAAAA4zCB4AYJKoZIhvcNAQcGoIHSMIHPAgEAMIHJBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwHgYJYIZIAWUDBAEuMBEEDBOcqpH007_jl3NuIAIBEICBm79hbra_09vnqNOWb-8NTSuKsK6SuuzY8Uhc1blkB4wQ1zByhWCVIe3z14Vb_w9y_q7_AF8dwbBr3wecPjN6qyyQ63RxgV9CO1gJHRw9Z_RqgM-eAtDRUxhkYIADMIc_cEJRQ6lZm4XaMekP5q01tSIMVScoDB3JWiY-8am852UJLQsj91t99uwQtq4c0488-fvonncYL8faeSSP Text: Availability: 1 Value: <anid>AN0130147675;4n601aug.18;2018Jun15.09:16;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0130147675-1">Building Systems from Scratch: an Exploratory Study of Students Learning About Climate Change </title> <p>Science and computational practices such as modeling and abstraction are critical to understanding the complex systems that are integral to climate science. Given the demonstrated affordances of game design in supporting such practices, we implemented a free 4-day intensive workshop for middle school girls that focused on using the visual programming environment, Scratch, to design games to teach others about climate change. The experience was carefully constructed so that girls of widely differing levels of experience were able to engage in a cycle of game design. This qualitative study aimed to explore the representational choices the girls made as they took up aspects of climate change systems and modeled them in their games. Evidence points to the ways in which designing games about climate science fostered emergent systems thinking and engagement in modeling practices as learners chose what to represent in their games, grappled with the realism of their respective representations, and modeled interactions among systems components. Given the girls’ levels of programming skill, parts of systems were more tractable to create than others. The educational purpose of the games was important to the girls’ overall design experience, since it influenced their choice of topic, and challenged their emergent understanding of climate change as a systems problem.</p> <p>Computer game design; Informal learning; Climate change systems; Modeling</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-2">Introduction</hd> <p>Educational initiatives that include game design for young learners have steadily increased in the past decade with the advent of visual programming environments such as Alice and Scratch. In particular, game creation as an introduction to programming and computational thinking has proven to be highly engaging at both middle and high school levels (e.g., Aydin [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref1">3</reflink>] ; Lee et al. [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref2">45</reflink>] ; Werner et al. [<reflink idref="bib78" id="ref3">78</reflink>] ). For example, Denner et al. ([<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref4">17</reflink>] ) argue that learning computational thinking is more accessible to a wider range of audiences through game design learning environments. Game design can be effective in teaching about domain-specific content as well, for example, systems thinking (Puttick et al. [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref5">60</reflink>] ; Salen [<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref6">66</reflink>] ), mathematics (Tucker-Raymond et al. [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref7">73</reflink>] ), and model building (Repenning et al. [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref8">61</reflink>] ).</p> <p>Young people collaborate in many ways in creating educational games, and draw on multiple resources. They ask other students and teachers for their opinions, for help in completing procedures, and for how to include scientifically accepted claims and ideas in their games. They use other students’ games for inspiration and ideas (Baytak and Land [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref9">6</reflink>] ). For girls in particular, Denner has shown that creating games has had positive effects on the engagement and learning of middle school girls (Denner [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref10">15</reflink>] ), and increases their interest in computing (Denner [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref11">16</reflink>] ). Carbonero et al. ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref12">10</reflink>] ) found that constructing computer games resulted in equal engagement and success in tenth-grade boys and girls, and argue that their approach is a viable gender-neutral way to increase female participation in programming.</p> <p>As education researchers innovate to address climate change instruction, more effective pedagogical tools and approaches to teaching and learning about complexity are being developed and studied. As one example, Tutwiler and Grotzer ([<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref13">74</reflink>] ) describe significant improvement in middle school students’ ability to reason about complex causality and systems behavior in an immersive simulation of a pond ecosystem. Furthermore, student engagement in modeling practices essential to constructing a systems understanding was supported by the tools and context provided in this simulation (Kamarainen et al. [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref14">41</reflink>] ).</p> <p>This qualitative research study describes outcomes from a project designed to explore what young people learned about climate change as they designed computer games using the programming platform Scratch. The learning experience we describe in this paper consisted of a 4-day summer workshop in which five middle school girls were tasked with designing a game to teach others about the connection between their energy choices and climate change. The experience was carefully constructed so that girls of widely differing levels of experience were able to engage in a cycle of game design. We report outcomes related to participants’ construction of models of climate change systems in their games, and the ways in which they constructed their games as tools to teach others.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-3">Theoretical Framework</hd> <p>Our research lies at the intersection of two fields, learning about climate change systems and learning from game design. We bind these fields with a theory of learning based in sociocultural constructionist pedagogy. In this theoretical framework, we first frame our perspective on learning about climate change systems, discuss our definition of learning and how we can tell someone has learned, and lay out our rationale for focusing the study on girls. Finally, we illustrate how using game design as an instructional tool may address the challenges and opportunities of learning from game design by considering games as opportunities to model aspects of climate change systems.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-4">Systems and Climate Change</hd> <p>Sabelli ([<reflink idref="bib65" id="ref15">65</reflink>] ), Songer et al. ([<reflink idref="bib71" id="ref16">71</reflink>] ), and others have argued that understanding complex systems is a critical component of science literacy. Practices related to understanding complex systems include modeling and abstraction, which are crucial tools used by climate scientists. Given the demonstrated affordances of game design in supporting learning about systems and modeling them, we were interested in the possible use of game design to support learners in modeling climate systems.</p> <p>Education about climate change has been thought to be challenging because it involves complex systems interactions (Orion and Ault Jr [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref17">54</reflink>] ; McNeill et al. [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref18">49</reflink>] ). For example, students must first understand how carbon dioxide moves within the “carbon cycle” system in order to fully understand the impacts of its accumulation in the atmosphere. As Grotzer ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref19">30</reflink>] ) and Grotzer and Lincoln ([<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref20">31</reflink>] ) observe, researchers have often adopted an approach to learning and understanding that highlights what learners do not know about the topic rather than what they do know. For example, researchers have reported that the dynamics of systems—e.g., flows, feedback loops, emergence—are difficult concepts for both middle and high school students to access. Gotwals and Songer ([<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref21">28</reflink>] ) and Riess and Mischo ([<reflink idref="bib63" id="ref22">63</reflink>] ) report that students tend to approach the relationships among systems components from a linear perspective, perceiving single cause-and-effect relationships, and not the multiple interacting connections that are possible among components. Penner ([<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref23">57</reflink>] ), in a study of how middle school students come to understand the phenomenon of emergence in systems, reports that they have little experience in “thinking with and about even simple non-emergent systems” (p. 803).</p> <p>Like others, we suspect that middle school students have not had much time to learn from a systems thinking perspective. For example, the work of Hmelo-Silver et al. ([<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref24">36</reflink>] ), Wilensky and Jacobson ([<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref25">79</reflink>] ), Goh et al. ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref26">26</reflink>] ), and others shows that “little of the conceptual power embodied in the rapidly developing perspectives and tools of complex systems has informed most people’s educational experience” (Wilensky and Jacobson [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref27">79</reflink>] , p. 321). With respect to climate change, Mohan et al. ([<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref28">52</reflink>] ) point to the fact that “most high school and college students do not use scientific models and principles to explain and predict carbon-transforming processes” (p. 678). This is even more true of education at the middle school level.</p> <p>However, research has shown that middle school students can understand scientific phenomena through an emergent perspective on systems. Research reveals that middle school students can readily identify components of systems (e.g., Hmelo-Silver et al. [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref29">36</reflink>] ; Penner [<reflink idref="bib57" id="ref30">57</reflink>] ; Hmelo-Silver and Pfeffer [<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref31">35</reflink>] ). Similarly, Goh et al. ([<reflink idref="bib26" id="ref32">26</reflink>] ), in studying high school biology students’ responses to an interview item about complex systems in an ecological context, found that students were easily able to grasp the interconnected nature of these systems. In this study, we focus on the aspects of climate systems that students do model, rather than those that they do not.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-5">Learning, Constructionism, and Performance Assessment</hd> <p>We define learning as the internalization and externalization of social meanings, mediated by the semiotic resources, or representations (e.g., words, images, programming language) that participants utilize in activity (Vygotsky [<reflink idref="bib76" id="ref33">76</reflink>] ; Gooding [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref34">27</reflink>] ; Lehrer and Schauble [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref35">46</reflink>] ; Duschl [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref36">20</reflink>] ). At the same time, learning cannot be separated from the context in which it is built (e.g., Lave and Wenger [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref37">43</reflink>] ). People transform information from other socially constructed and constituted sources and then individually or collaboratively produce novel (for the learner) representations, in our case, video games. When they do this, we can say they have learned, and what we say they have learned is the whole of the video game that represents some model of climate change.</p> <p>We, among others, also believe that when people are given the explicit task of building novel structures, be they representational or not, they learn best. This is a central tenet of constructionism (Papert and Harel [<reflink idref="bib56" id="ref38">56</reflink>] ). By constructing new arrangements of representations that function as semiotic resources on which learners draw, by making a video game and constructing evolving concept maps, learners create and then must confront a myriad of problems. As they solve those problems while constructing a video game, they build a model of the world, and they name the parts of that world that they envision to be important. In short, through creating video games, they model and highlight the most important parts of the world to them.</p> <p>A single video game cannot represent all the information that a person may be able to produce about a topic. The learner may also have constructed internal representations, or semiotic resources, that they are not able to externalize for whatever reason, including a lack of familiarity with the programming language they are using to build the game. For example, Helms et al. ([<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref39">33</reflink>] ) discuss an intervention in which high school students built functional models of human body systems and could answer complex questions related to systems behavior that were not explicitly represented in their models. Likewise, we use participants’ video games as a conservative proxy for the transformed meanings that learners are able to show in other contexts. We consider participants’ games to represent “epistemic artifacts” (Sterelny [<reflink idref="bib72" id="ref40">72</reflink>] ), that can show the joint development of representational and conceptual competence (cf. DiSessa [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref41">18</reflink>] ). Because learning requires the deployment of novel representational resources, and systems are inherently complex, likewise requiring the deployment of complex semiotic resources, a test on discrete knowledge bits that might ask such questions as “what are the causes of climate change?” was not sufficient. Thus, we used learners’ video games as performance assessments. Performance tasks ask learners to use both their content knowledge (climate change and systems) and their process skills (computing) to demonstrate what they can do.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-6">Modeling Through Game Design</hd> <p>Much attention has focused on what students learn about programming and computer science concepts from computer game design in collaborative participatory learning environments (e.g., Adams and Webster [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref42">1</reflink>] ; Maloney et al. [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref43">48</reflink>] ; Resnick et al. [<reflink idref="bib62" id="ref44">62</reflink>] ; Basawapatna et al. [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref45">5</reflink>] ; Denner et al. [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref46">17</reflink>] ). However, research on programs that effectively teach other domain-specific content through game design is only now becoming more prevalent (e.g., Repenning et al. [<reflink idref="bib61" id="ref47">61</reflink>] ; Tucker-Raymond et al. [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref48">73</reflink>] ; Puttick et al. [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref49">59</reflink>] ), although Kafai demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach in teaching fractions in elementary classrooms almost two decades ago (Kafai et al. [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref50">40</reflink>] ). Content-focused game design programs have focused on, for example, immunology for high school students (Khalili et al. [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref51">42</reflink>] ), mathematics (Tucker-Raymond et al. [<reflink idref="bib73" id="ref52">73</reflink>] ), and nutrition (Baytak and Land [<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref53">6</reflink>] ). Tucker-Raymond and colleagues describe student learning and career awareness in a project in which middle and high school students made games that taught about topics in mathematics such as coordinate planes, geometry, and linear functions.</p> <p>We use Ingham and Gilbert’s definition of a model, as a simplified representation of a system, which concentrates attention on specific aspects of the system, at the expense of others (Ingham and Gilbert [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref54">38</reflink>] ). To construct a model, the learner integrates pieces of information about the structure, function, and causal connections or mechanisms of the phenomenon (Buckley [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref55">9</reflink>] ), including only features that are important to understand the system being modeled (Windschitl [<reflink idref="bib80" id="ref56">80</reflink>] ). Game design requires many modeling practices such as representing processes through abstractions, and deconstructing problems into a series of ordered steps. Game design is a species of model building, and learning outcomes such as explicitness, iterative design-analysis-revision cycles from learners, incorporating input and output elements, and flow among other things are all part of the expressive power of model building (Clement and Rea-Ramirez [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref57">13</reflink>] ).</p> <p>Furthermore, game design can be effective in teaching about systems. For example, we conducted an exploratory study of middle school girls designing Scratch games to teach about the trade-offs associated with different energy choices and relating these to climate change (Puttick et al. [<reflink idref="bib60" id="ref58">60</reflink>] ). We found that participants in this study struggled with and eventually understood the complex nature of trade-offs, particularly when it came time to enact trade-offs in designing their games.</p> <p>Observing middle school students testing an early version of Gamestar Mechanic, Salen ([<reflink idref="bib66" id="ref59">66</reflink>] ) reports that students thought and spoke as designers of systems, observing that: “We saw them able to articulate a set of rules that gave their system meaning and we watched as they shared their knowledge of this system by successfully playing and reviewing each other’s games” (p. 310). Although students used a predesigned city in SimCity in a research study reported by GlassLab ([<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref60">25</reflink>] ), the game tools provided students with considerable capacity to author the fate of the city as they were faced with an optimization problem to reduce air pollution while growing the economy to preserve jobs. The researchers found that sophisticated strategies arose as players came to consider multiple interdependent variables in concert during the optimization task (GlassLab [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref61">25</reflink>] ).</p> <p>Clement ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref62">12</reflink>] ) pointed to the centrality of models in scientific practice, in which explanatory models go beyond a representation of what can be observed to constitute a separate level of thinking that allow one to “make the unfamiliar familiar” (Nagel [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref63">53</reflink>] ), or to make one’s “thinking visible” (Michaels et al. [<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref64">50</reflink>] ) (Clement [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref65">12</reflink>] , p. 1041). Of particular interest to us is Clement’s description of the learning goals set for a modeling task. Students need not necessarily produce a model that is as sophisticated as the expert consensus model, but rather one that can represent a public articulation of a learner’s emergent understanding (Clement [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref66">12</reflink>] ). Greeno and Hall ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref67">29</reflink>] ) point out that when representations (or models) are used as tools, e.g., for communicating, they can be adapted for the purpose at hand, and sometimes nonstandard representations can better serve the designer’s purpose.</p> <p>Based on the success of participants’ learning in previous studies and the affordances of a constructionist environment for providing participants with opportunities to transform social meanings into novel semiotic productions, we designed the game-building learning environment and then studied what our participants learned through that same framework.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-7">Gender</hd> <p>The American Association of University Women (AAUW) reports that too few girls are pursuing studies in computing, and the number of female students majoring in computing in college has fallen dramatically over the last two decades (Hill et al. [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref68">34</reflink>] ). Providing girls with early computing experience is widely acknowledged as one of the strategies likely to have the greatest impact. Evidence shows that girls can flourish in informal learning settings (Girls Rise Network [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref69">23</reflink>] ), and that a girls-only learning environment results in more positive attitudes toward science and computing (Robinson et al. [<reflink idref="bib64" id="ref70">64</reflink>] ; Hodari et al. [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref71">37</reflink>] ; Ashcraft et al. [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref72">2</reflink>] ). Moreover, girls consistently value learning experiences that are seen to be related to everyday, real-world problems and issues (Osborne and Dillon [<reflink idref="bib55" id="ref73">55</reflink>] ), especially those that have a human connection.</p> <p>Environmental science in particular, with its real-world connection and its many perceived impacts on humans, is appealing to girls (e.g., Britner [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref74">7</reflink>] ; Schoenberg et al. [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref75">68</reflink>] ; Puttick et al. [<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref76">58</reflink>] ). For example, Sjoberg and Schreiner ([<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref77">70</reflink>] ), in an overview of findings from a synthesis of multinational research efforts focusing on the attitudes of young people toward science and technology, report that girls agreed significantly more than boys with statements related to the environment, “People should care more about protection of the environment,” and “I can personally influence what happens with the environment” (Sjoberg and Schreiner [<reflink idref="bib70" id="ref78">70</reflink>] ). In a national survey of girl scouts between the ages of 8-10 in the USA, over 50% of the respondents indicated that “helping animals or the environment” and 59% that “making the world a better place” was very important to them (Schoenberg et al. [<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref79">68</reflink>] ). Britner ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref80">7</reflink>] ), investigating the “moral reasoning” of urban middle school students with respect to the environment, found that girls’ reasoning in response to hypothetical environmental dilemmas were more strongly oriented toward care reasoning—that is, expressing connections among people—than the reasoning of boys, which was oriented toward abstract and formal justice concerns.</p> <p>In relation to computer science, Denner has shown that creating games has had positive effects on the engagement and learning of middle school girls (Denner [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref81">15</reflink>] ), and increases their interest in computing (Denner [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref82">16</reflink>] ). Lee and colleagues report a higher growth rate in self-regulation, a disposition important to future success in computer science, among girls who participated in a culturally responsive, informal computer education program that included game design, relative to a comparison group (Lee et al. [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref83">44</reflink>] ). Carbonero et al. ([<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref84">10</reflink>] ), in addressing the gender imbalance in computer science, found that constructing computer games resulted in equal engagement and success in tenth-grade boys and girls, and argue that their approach is a viable gender-neutral way to increase female participation. Based on these considerations, we narrowed the focus of our study to girls.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-8">Methods</hd> <p>In this study, we sought to understand how students in the summer workshop learned about climate science and engaged in modeling practices while designing games where the purpose was to teach others about climate change. We address the following research questions:</p> <p>What representational choices do the girls in our study make as they take up aspects of climate change?</p> <p>What do the models in their games tell us about their emergent understandings?</p> <p>What types of games do they design with respect to their structure and playability as teaching tools?</p> <p>To answer our questions, we employed an interpretive-constructivist research design using close participant observation as our main tool of data collection (Schwandt [<reflink idref="bib69" id="ref85">69</reflink>] ). We also videotaped the design sessions, interviewed participants, and collected artifacts. In this type of research, theory is generated from data collection and analysis based in the “shared experiences and relationships with participants and other sources of data” (Charmaz [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref86">11</reflink>] , p. 130). Such a stance helped us to be reflexive about how our own presuppositions both as facilitators and researchers affected our analysis.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-9">The Program</hd> <p>The program was a free 4-day intensive game design and climate change workshop for middle school girls, held in the summertime, that focused on how human energy choices and energy conservation are linked to climate change. In the workshop, five girls used a visual programming environment, Scratch, to create their games. In Scratch, designers create projects by snapping together color-coded command blocks to control 2D graphical objects, called sprites, that move on a background, called the stage (Maloney et al. [<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref87">48</reflink>] ).</p> <p>The workshop ran 6 h a day; total contact time was 24 h. There were laptop computers for each student and a room computer with a projector. Learning configurations varied. Girls worked alone when programming their games, but came together to discuss the science topics and to show their progress to the group. Girls gave a final presentation attended by family and community members. Students also took a trip to a local wetland reserve and a city park under construction to consider what, if any, systems they could observe, and what, if any, connections they could make between these places and climate change. The two researchers acted as facilitators—Puttick led most of the discussions on climate change, while Tucker-Raymond provided most of the support for game design and programming.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-10">Day 1</hd> <p>Participants signed up for Scratch accounts were shown how to construct a simple code to make a sprite move, and explored the programming environment. Next, participants took a field trip to a local wetlands reserve, documenting observations with photos and sketches. We discussed possible relationships between the reserve and climate change, thus introducing the idea of systems by asking girls what connections they could see among the various components of the reserve, including humans as part of the system, and how those relationships might be connected to climate change. In the afternoon, girls began a group concept mapping activity, intended to provide a visual learning tool for them to make and see connections about climate systems. Guiding questions that participants kept in mind focused on what climate change is and what causes it, what consumes and conserves energy, and how energy use, including the girls’ own choices, is connected to climate change. Participants watched an animated video that introduced climate change from a systems perspective by linking human consumption to Earth systems: https://<ulink href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKq8DixcbyQ">www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKq8DixcbyQ</ulink>. Finally, participants were shown some game design storyboards, with examples, to begin to sketch their game ideas.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-11">Days 2 and 3</hd> <p>Participants programmed games, only pausing to conduct user tests or explain their games to others. Facilitators circulated and, by the middle of day 2, were encouraging the girls to think explicitly about systems in their games. Each day, girls also renegotiated and elaborated the concept map in a group discussion, incorporating new content from their own web research for content that was explicitly necessary for their own games.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-12">Day 4</hd> <p>Participants spent the day programming and debugging. The last hour consisted of presentations to family and community members, followed by free play of the girls’ games.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-13">Participants</hd> <p>Participants were recruited through outreach and flyers to school districts, parent listservs, and other STEM-promoting youth organizations through which authors had contacts. The participants were rising sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, each from a school in a different municipality. Three girls were African American; one was European American, and one was Nepali American. Two girls, Lane and Raya, had no Scratch experience; Eady had learned Scratch eight months previously, but had not used it since, and Tiana and Ciara had more than a year’s familiarity with the program. When asked what drew them to the workshop, two of the girls listed learning or using Scratch as the reason, while one cited the science connection, and one cited the idea of “making a game to help the earth.” They all came into the workshop already knowing and caring about climate change, and mentioned it as one of the reasons they joined the workshop. One student did not answer the survey question. Informed consent was obtained from parents, and assent from individual participants included in the study. Participant pseudonyms are used.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-14">Data Sources</hd> <hd id="AN0130147675-15">Interviews</hd> <p>We conducted semi-structured interviews with each girl in the afternoon of day 3 to gain a more nuanced understanding of their experience. We asked them to describe what their game was about and how it worked, to talk about any systems that might be in their game, and how they thought the game was related to global warming. Interviews were 35-40 min in duration. They were recorded using Silverback software to be able to align participant’s comments with actions they may have made on the computer.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-16">Concept Mapping</hd> <p>The daily group discussion was videotaped. Videotapes were logged, and themes were generated using the logs and the end-of-day representations and changes from each concept map.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-17">User Testing</hd> <p>At least once each day, in pairs, girls tested each other’s games and thought aloud about their progress and challenges. These think-alouds and user testing episodes were recorded using Silverback usability testing software. Copies of girls’ games were saved and archived at the end of each day.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-18">Final Presentation</hd> <p>Parents, guardians, family, and friends, as well as selected TERC staff, were invited to attend the last session of the workshop. A total of 16 guests attended as the girls described their games, gave details about systems and trade-offs in their games, as well as the ways in which their games were related to global warming. These presentations were videotaped.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-19">Surveys</hd> <p>Girls completed a brief (5 min) pre/post survey. The survey included 13 multiple-choice questions designed to assess knowledge about climate change, and personal actions with respect to climate change. We also collected demographic information, histories of experience, and knowledge about programming.</p> <p>Where available, items were adapted from validated instruments, for example, the Six America’s Survey from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication (Leiserowitz et al. [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref88">47</reflink>] ). We tested our survey with a focus group of four middle school girls, and adapted the items based on their vocabulary and sentence structure comprehension. Content was validated by expert review; questions did not require revision.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-20">Video of Programming Activities</hd> <p>For the most part, this video captured the overall environment. There were moments of dialog between students or between staff and students that were logged and used to check, add to, confirm, or disconfirm interview, group discussion, and presentation data. Participant-observer notes from the researchers provided additional data and directions for analysis.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-21">Data Analysis</hd> <p>Transcripts from interviews and conversations as well as logs of video data were imported into a web-based qualitative analysis tool, Dedoose. We used a combined deductive and inductive approach to analyzing the data. We generated a preliminary set of predetermined (etic) codes based on principles in our theoretical framework including climate science content, game design, and systems thinking (Miles and Huberman [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref89">51</reflink>] ) to categorize our data in four coding categories: science related to climate change systems, other science, game, and socioecological connections. At the same time, we used an inductive grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss [<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref90">24</reflink>] ) to identify new patterns and ideas from the participants as they emerged (Creswell [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref91">14</reflink>] ), generating emic codes as we identified new themes. One such code, for example, was distinguishing between one’s own and others’ actions that mitigate climate change or that contribute to climate change. These codes then became our focused codes. The final focused codes are shown in Table 1.</p> <p>We then created analytic memos of data related to each of the focused codes. The memos helped to distill the main patterns found in each category across data sources. Memos also served to create theoretical categories that were then the basis for writing the first draft of the results sections.</p> <p>Trustworthiness of our findings was obtained through multiple processes. First, we collected data from a number of sources, including interviews with the girls about their games. Multiple sources allowed us to co-locate our interpretations in more than one place. For instance, each day of the workshop, participants spent some time in group discussion to develop and build on a concept map that linked all that they had learned about factors involved in the climate change system, and related to energy use. In essence, the concept map represented a model of their emergent understanding of factors involved in the global climate change system. Analysis revealed that the learning represented in participant games was corroborated by data that the girls generated in this model. Second, in the present study, we each separately coded the interviews, observational data, and games. We met to resolve differences after coding each artifact. Third, in conversation with each other, we contributed to writing each memo. Differences in interpretation were resolved through discussion that was then reflected in revised memos. From our memos, we identified two major ways in which girls’ games had implications for learning science. They produced models of climate change systems in their games, and they used their games as tools to teach others.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-22">Results</hd> <p>Data presented here are organized into three themes that address our research questions: choices of climate science content, models and emergent understandings of systems, and games as teaching tools.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-23">Climate Change Content</hd> <p>All of the girls chose to focus their games on a cause or causes of climate change and ways to mitigate it (Table 2).</p> <p>Each participant chose to represent only some aspect of a climate subsystem or system, but the ongoing concept map activity allowed them to demonstrate a broader range of knowledge of climate systems than they did in their games alone. However, analysis of the content of their games illustrates nuances in the ways in which they approached their chosen topic.</p> <p>Overall, the girls made varied choices as they selected what components of climate change they would represent in their games, and how they would model interactions among them. Constructs such as greenhouse gas production and mitigation, that is, cycling of greenhouse gases, and the importance of time and scale, are all aspects of climate change systems. These components were all represented to some extent in all the games. For example, Ciara spoke in the interview of what she learned about trees as carbon sinks:</p> <p>I knew that trees absorbed CO<subs>2</subs>I just didn’t know they had a real name [carbon sinks]. […] I don’t think a lot of people know about carbon sinks and we’re chopping them down a lot […] there’s few left to take out the greenhouse gases.</p> <p></p> <p>Lane explicitly represented human figures in her game and was clear about a detrimental role of humans in the whole systems perspective. She described their role in disrupting the carbon cycle:</p> <p>Also if you think about deforesting and clearing away forest areas, plant areas and wildlife, the amount of things that can absorb the CO<subs>2</subs>is going down. And also since there is a limit we can’t really rely on anyone other than ourselves to stop this.</p> <p>Both Lane and Eady expressed concern about the time it took for trees to grow or to convert carbon dioxide in real life, and thought that it could have been more realistic in their games. However, neither explicitly expressed concern that this difference would interfere with players’ learning.</p> <p>In different ways, the girls all made the human connection to climate change visible as well. For example, Tiana’s was a personal connection as she represented herself in a tutu in the game with the task of capturing methane released by cows as an example of mitigation (Fig. 1). While her game only represented surface level components of climate systems, Tiana put herself in the center of mitigating climate change, representing her personal responsibility. Tiana learned that as the designer of the game, she could represent herself as an agent of change. In the first sense, she is a component of the system. In the latter sense, she actively created the model of the world with the power to place herself in the way she wanted.The human agent in the game executes balletic jumps to catch methane, emanating from the cow, before it “reaches the atmosphere”</p> <p>Lane’s connections to humans, on the other hand, were impersonal, but in essence, her screen characters stand in for everyone on Earth, as she elaborated in the interview:</p> <p>If you think about deforesting…the amount of things that can absorb the CO<subs>2</subs>is going down [from deforestation]. And also since there is a limit we can’t really rely on anyone other than ourselves to stop this…the people are trading the safety of the planet for their own comfort. What I mean by that is people are choosing to ignore it so they’re basically pushing away anything that they see that promotes awareness of what’s happening, so they’re living their lives, not ignorant but in willing ignorance.</p> <p>We discuss the relationship between the girls’ environmental attitudes and game design elsewhere (Puttick et al. [<reflink idref="bib59" id="ref92">59</reflink>] ), but, briefly, Lane made the “willing ignorance” of humans visible by positioning two characters in the center of the system she had portrayed (Fig. 2). She emphasized the moral dimension of their inaction by positioning the cloud of CO<subs>2</subs> directly over their heads, yet their goofy smiles remain unchanged.The player clicks different plants in Lane’s game to sequester carbon dioxide; the humans demonstrate willing ignorance of climate change, signified by a black cloud hovering over them</p> <p>Lane, like Raya, acknowledged the larger scales of human action and space in her interview as she elaborated on the socioecological and moral aspects of human relationships to global warming. While not represented in her game, both space and time are essential elements of a systems view:</p> <p>It’s trading present comfort for an uncertain future or an uncertain now, for like, cause like in the Arctic things are melting rapidly, polar bears are going extinct…</p> <p>Lane articulated that people’s actions and choices have an effect at a distance. We are all connected in one system that has inescapable consequences. She continued:</p> <p>…millions of people are saying, “Oh no, I won’t make that much of a difference by not driving my car,” but they drive their cars and they’re all making a massive difference like putting literal tons of CO<subs>2</subs>into the air, which is heating up the planet[…] this is what’s going to happen, its not going to happen in 10 billion years, you can’t solve this just by throwing away, I mean recycling one plastic bottle. You can’t do this just by turning off the lights for one day and then rewarding yourself the next day with a full day of screen time.</p> <p>She acknowledged that the scale of the problem is hard to comprehend, is more immediate than people seem to think, and implied that actions will require sustained effort by people to shift habits.</p> <p>Three of the games (Ciara, Lane, Raya) directly represented time as a factor in climate change; the games only ended when time ran out. All three were about the production of greenhouse gases as an ongoing phenomenon. A timer is a common feature of computer game play and may also be thought of as analogous to the short time remaining to address climate change if human behavior does not change. The timer adds to the sense of urgency about the scope of climate change and the need to address it, especially in Lane’s game, which she purposefully made virtually impossible to win.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-24">Models and Emergent Understanding of Systems</hd> <p>Before they had begun to think about their game design, the girls generated a beginning model in the form of a concept map on the first day. Collectively, they could link energy use to the burning of fossil fuels and its contribution to “global warming,” and state that global warming was the cause of “climate change.” In addition, they linked “greenhouse gases” to global warming, and stated that temperatures change because of this. As they designed their games, the girls engaged in practices essential to modeling—which can be seen as a form of computational thinking (Weintrop et al. [<reflink idref="bib77" id="ref93">77</reflink>] ; Hoover et al. [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref94">39</reflink>] )—such as abstraction, managing complexity, creative design, data representation, and iterative testing and debugging.</p> <p>In speaking in the interview of her new understanding of trees as carbon sinks (see above), Ciara was describing an important dynamic in the carbon cycle. As she took ownership of the idea of carbon sinks, she centered her entire game on this abstraction that represented real objects in the world. As we described earlier, abstraction is a key step in modeling practice. It opened a new perspective for her about what function trees—and in her second game, oceans and the soil—could serve.</p> <p>This realization was important enough for her that the task for players that she presented in the second stage of her game was to enact this abstracting move. Players took the clip art examples of real objects she provided—the ocean, trees, the soil, all of which sequester carbon, and a gas cylinder, an electric fan, a trash can which do not—and were asked to sort them as carbon sinks or not. Ciara even used the online research on carbon sinks she had done for the game to add to the group concept map.</p> <p>Furthermore, in the interview, Ciara explicitly talks about the system in her game:</p> <p>I think there’s, they’re all connected in a way because the cows are talking about how they contribute to the greenhouse gases and the carbon sinks are talking about how they take away the gases, so I guess there’s a system in there.</p> <p></p> <p>Across her three games, Ciara chose to model features of the carbon cycle—the connection between cows that contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and carbon sinks that remove them. We argue that this excerpt demonstrates her emergent understanding of important systems features, that is, inputs, outputs, and flow.</p> <p>In her interview, Lane talked about systems components and functions for two levels at least, from the chemical level in photosynthesis (“the system in plants is photosynthesis and almost no // pretty much no animals can do photosynthesis and that helps get the carbon dioxide out of the air and converts it into oxygen”) to the global level in describing the greenhouse effect (“CO<subs>2</subs>acts like kind of a blanket around the earth that traps the sun’s heat there to keep everything warm”). Lane’s gameplay centered on the different capacities for carbon sequestration represented by different species of plants. The representation she chose modeled an important nuance in the biotic sequestration of carbon dioxide, a subsystem of the carbon cycle. Integral to gameplay, she modeled the limits in how much carbon could be sequestered in each type of plant—after a predetermined number of clicks on an individual plant the player receives a message that, “A plant can only hold so much CO2. Click on a different plant!” The concept of limits as represented in her game is evidence of her systems understanding of limits, an emergent understanding of limits more broadly as an important feature of systems. Further, the structure of Lane’s game both makes it engaging to play and supportive of learning about specific science content. That is, the player is engaged in exploring some core systems behavior (Wilensky and Jacobson [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref95">79</reflink>] ) as she tries to sequester carbon in different plants and needs to figure out a strategy to sequester the maximum amount as the timer runs down.</p> <p>Raya represented two systems components in a simple model, a factory, and the “pollution”—clouds of greenhouse gases—that emanate more and more quickly from the factory chimney as time elapses in the game. Requiring the player to keep up and click them as often as they come out implicitly reinforces the idea that Raya brings up in her interview that humans need to act “constantly” to “actually help.” Raya names factory smoke as pollution at one point in time, and as greenhouse gases at another. However, her representation reveals a model of a basic causal chain. In addition, as already mentioned in the previous section, the carbon dioxide produced by factories in Raya’s game implicitly represents another systemic causal chain between human consumption, the production of consumer goods in factories, and the generation of greenhouse gases. Subsequently, in their discussions of the concept map on day 3, Rays and others elaborated anthropogenic impacts—listing automobiles, home heating, home electricity use, and “buying stuff.” Overall, we found that content traveled back and forth between the model as represented in the concept map and the models in the girls’ games.</p> <p>Throughout the workshop, the group integrated humans into the concept map model explicitly. For instance, they (a) stated that humans contributed to climate change through deforestation, a topic that was especially interesting to Lane and Eady, even though it was not explicitly the subject of their games, (b) implicated humans in exacerbating and/or mitigating climate change directly through their energy or consumer choices, and (c) recognized reinforcing feedback loops between increased energy use to keep cool as temperatures increase, and the impact of increased energy use on levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. They identified methane as a greenhouse gas, stated that humans could mitigate its effect by capturing it, as Ciara and Tiana did in their games, and included large-scale farming as a significant source of methane, a greenhouse gas.</p> <p>Eady, too, identified trees as important components of the carbon cycle, as agents that take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (Fig. 3).In Eady’s game, the player clicks the bee to drop seeds, trees grow on-screen, and the bee must move quickly to drop seeds in spaces that are still open</p> <p>In her interview, Eady elaborated the notion of cycling—a key systems concept—that is represented in her game. When asked about how systems might be present in her game, she talked about tree functioning, expressed as “cleaning the air:”</p> <p>Yeah and they release oxygen over and over again that cleans the air and helps stop trapping the heat inside the earth. Because the carbon dioxide is what keeps it in along with other gases.</p> <p>Like Ciara’s research, Eady’s research about the annual anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions contributed to the group concept map. The data from the concept map, her interview, and her game together reveal an emergent understanding of the dual cycling function of trees from an ecosystem perspective, taking up carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen. Greeno and Hall ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref96">29</reflink>] ) point out that when representations (or models) are used as tools, they can be adapted for the purpose at hand, and sometimes nonstandard representations can better serve the designer’s purpose. For example, Eady used a bee as an on-screen agent for the player to plant the seeds that grow into trees that in turn make the carbon dioxide molecules disappear. This model served her purpose in creating an esthetically pleasing and engaging gameplay experience.</p> <p>In creating their games, the participants also learned that they had the power to teach other people about some of the mechanisms involved in climate change system functioning. The need for the player to “do something” in the game and to learn something from the game meant that gameplay actions needed to be about interactions. For example, planting trees makes carbon dioxide vanish; clicking on plants stores carbon dioxide. Thus, the player explores systems behavior to a small degree as she engages with the causal connections or mechanisms (Buckley [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref97">9</reflink>] ; Tutwiler and Grotzer [<reflink idref="bib74" id="ref98">74</reflink>] ) represented in the games.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-25">Games as Teaching Tools</hd> <p>All of the participants talked explicitly about their games as tools to teach about causes and mitigating factors of climate change in their interviews. For example, Ciara’s reasons for designing a second game about classifying carbon sinks was to inform others about a topic she thought they might know less about:</p> <p>I don’t think a lot of people know about carbon sinks […] So I was thinking if people knew about them more then maybe they would stop and think about what they did if they took out the carbon sinks.</p> <p>Ciara was not necessarily teaching to the big ideas of climate change but chose a topic that struck a chord with her personally, something that she had just learned herself. This was a tension in our design for the learning experience overall. We wanted projects to be personally compelling to participants, and at the same time wanted them to come away with a systems perspective on climate issues.</p> <p>Like Ciara, Lane hoped that her game would compel people to act on climate change based on the information that they learned in the game:</p> <p>I hope people learn from this game that the plants have a limit of the carbon dioxide they can absorb, just like in real life. So from this angle people learn that they can’t just like put their burden on the plants, it’s not enough.</p> <p>Of all the participants, Lane expressed the most concern about the limits of the earth’s ecosystem and human kind’s expectations of those limits. The chosen focus of game, and the desired learning outcome, reflects her multiple expressions over the course of the week of anxiety over the “burden” people were continuing to place on plants and its unsustainability for a healthy world.</p> <p>Raya too wanted people to learn from her game about the impacts of their consumer habits on the environment, in particular making the connection between these and energy use, one of the themes of the workshop. Explaining why she chose the topic of her game, she said:</p> <p>I don’t think people realize how much pollution, from the stuff that you buy, can actually make when they’re in factories…</p> <p>However, she did not make this connection explicit in her game. Rather, it concerned how factories produce carbon dioxide, the difficulty of controlling it, and the connection between carbon dioxide and global warming as part of the same system. Instead, in describing how to play her game she said:</p> <p>Click the clouds to collect the carbon dioxide puffs. By clicking on the clouds you are not only trying to beat the high score but you are also eliminating the Earth’s rising carbon dioxide levels which contribute to Global Warming.</p> <p>Like the others, Tiana also wanted to make others aware of factors contributing to climate change:</p> <p>I hope that they [players] can learn that cows are more than what they seem.</p> <p></p> <p>All of the girls conveyed their intended learning goals similarly in their games. In four of the games, an introductory text rather than gameplay conveyed the intended lesson; in the fifth, some text at the conclusion of gameplay explained the learning goal. Thus, the participants’ games might be classified as containing at least two parts: (a) an information/learning section and (b) an engagement/play section, in which learning might or might not be implicit in game play.</p> <p>For instance, Ciara’s first introduction screen to her games introduces the overarching topic: Greenhouse gases are polluting the earth. You have to save the earth by helping to rid the atmosphere of these chemicals. Good luck! Next, the specific introduction to the first game describes the goal: When a cow burps or farts, it is your job to catch it [the methane] before it reaches the atmosphere, while the introduction to the second game states: Carbon sinks are objects that take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Look at the descriptions in the following pictures and decide which object in each pair is a carbon sink.</p> <p>Thus, the player learns that the gas emitted by cows is a greenhouse gas in game 1 and that carbon sinks take up a greenhouse gas in game 2, under the overall topic of saving the earth by ridding the atmosphere of these “chemicals.” Less explicit to the learner are the ways in which carbon sinks or methane capture are connected systematically to mitigating climate change.</p> <p>Eady also, more didactically and with more detail, used two textual introduction screens to convey information about climate change: An average 20 gal of carbon dioxide is brought in for every gallon of gas a car uses. […] Along with other gases, carbon dioxide keeps heat inside the earth [atmosphere]. But, we can reduce the rate of global warming, and, Trees are a big help to reduce carbon dioxide levels. […] Planting trees is an easy way to help decrease carbon dioxide. During the game, the player plants trees and carbon dioxide bubbles disappear as a result of uptake, yet play and learning are not integrated.</p> <p>All participants besides Eady used the pointer as the on-screen agent. This made the player the direct agent for climate change mitigation in their games, and thus emphasizes the potential role of humans in mitigating climate change in the world. Raya was clear that the ongoing nature of the problem will need to be addressed on a large human scale and more consistently than taking a sporadic action:</p> <p>Basically, my game relates to global warming because factories, they produce a lot of carbon dioxide and they make pollution, and they pollute the air, and polluting the air causes greenhouse gases to trap all that heat and creates global warming…And it shows how in real life you need to have like a certain amount in order to actually help. You know, you can’t just turn off the light once and then it’ll be fine, it’s like you need to do it constantly.</p> <p></p> <p>In summary, the evidence suggests that the educational purpose of the games was important to the girls’ overall design experience, influenced their choice of topic, and drove their emergent understanding of climate change as a systems problem.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-26">Discussion</hd> <hd id="AN0130147675-27">Modeling Climate Change Systems</hd> <p>Evidence points to the ways in which designing games about climate science can foster emergent systems thinking and engagement in modeling practices as learners choose what to represent in their games and how to represent interactions among systems components. Overall, the girls’ games about aspects of climate change represented emergent systems models to varying degrees. Building games required them to identify and figure out how to represent—or model—the chosen climate system components, and demonstrate connections and interactions among them. Computational practices such as abstraction and decomposition, intrinsic to game design, are essential modeling practices. Clement ([<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref99">12</reflink>] ) points to the fact that if students are engaged in a modeling task, learning outcomes need not require a sophisticated consensus model, but can quite validly represent the learner’s emergent understanding. This does not mean that the modeling task has failed. On the contrary, it can mean that learners are engaged in authentic modeling practice.</p> <p>Both Lane and Eady, for example, expressed concern about the time it took for trees to grow or to convert carbon dioxide in real life. They grappled with this variable when designing their games. However, neither explicitly expressed concern that this difference would interfere with players’ learning. Though they were ultimately dissatisfied with how they had not been able to deal with time as a variable from a modeling perspective, they were satisfied that the player would still grasp the main point they were modeling, that plants take up carbon dioxide. In fact, gameplay would have been less engaging had it been more realistically represented. In grappling with the realism of their respective representations of plant growth rates and rate of plant CO<subs>2</subs> uptake—or perceived lack of it—intrinsic to the games’ functioning, we argue that the girls worked with the expressive power of model building (Clement and Rea-Ramirez [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref100">13</reflink>] ).</p> <p>Greeno and Hall ([<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref101">29</reflink>] ) point out that when representations are used as tools, as in Eady’s game, a nonstandard representation may better serve the designer’s purpose. Eady made two modeling choices that involve nonstandard representations. First, she used a bee as the on-screen agent that plants trees. Second, she omitted a function of trees—producing oxygen—that she had described as important in her interview and chose only to represent carbon dioxide uptake. Although she understood that a more complete model of a tree as a component of an ecosystem might include both cycling processes, for present purposes, her choice of what to represent in her model was guided by the design task of teaching the player about greenhouse gases and their role in climate change.</p> <p>Furthermore, as GlassLab researchers showed (GlassLab [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref102">25</reflink>] ), some of our designers were considering interdependent variables in concert during the design task. For example, in Lane’s case, in particular, she worked to optimize what score to assign to each instance of “CO<subs>2</subs> uptake” by each type of plant, when each plant in the game should reach its absorption capacity, and how much time to allow to gameplay overall. As such, game design afforded Lane the opportunity to model several components of a system related to climate change.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-28">Game as Tool for Teaching Others</hd> <p>The evidence suggests that the educational purpose of the games was important to the girls’ overall design experience. It influenced their choice of topic, and challenged their emergent understanding of climate change as a systems problem. In their interviews, all of the participants talked explicitly about their games as tools to teach about causes and mitigating factors of climate change, all of the games reflected an emphasis on the human player as an agent who mitigates climate change, and at least three of the girls expressed the hope that their games would compel people to act on climate change based on the information that they learned in the game. All of the games intended to teach the player about something that they may previously have taken for granted. For example, in describing cows as “not what they seem,” Tiana was modeling cows as part of the climate change system, while Ciara wanted the player to learn that trees or the ocean as carbon sinks should be considered important parts of the system.</p> <p>The two-part structure of the games—having an information/learning section, and an engagement/play section, in which learning might or might not be implicit in game play—reflected the inherent challenge of designing educational games. The presentation of intended learning goals separately from the play section was not a surprising outcome, given the brief length of the girls’ immersion in game design, and, equally important, the fact that game design is challenging because it is a second-order design problem. That is, additional demands are placed on the designer because they only indirectly design what the player experiences (Salen and Zimmerman [<reflink idref="bib67" id="ref103">67</reflink>] ). In fact, one of the major criticisms of many commercial educational games is poor integration of educational content with gameplay (Egenfeldt-Nielsen [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref104">21</reflink>] ), which is testimony to the difficulty of the design task.</p> <p>The evidence suggests that girls placed equal value on the playability of their games as they did on teaching. What use is an educational game if it is not engaging to play? All of the games incorporated features that can be recognized in many videogames, such as timed gameplay, accruing a maximum score, and making consequential on-screen selections. For example, Lane’s game requires the player to make choices within a time limit. The player explores some core systems behavior (Wilensky and Jacobson [<reflink idref="bib79" id="ref105">79</reflink>] ) as she tries to sequester carbon in different plants and needs to figure out a strategy to sequester the maximum amount as the timer runs down. Lane also incorporated hidden surprises in the game which, if clicked on, presented the player with additional points, or a quirky joke. Eady’s use of a bee as the on-screen agent that drops seeds creates an esthetically engaging gameplay experience; clicking on clouds that emanate more and more quickly from a factory chimney in Raya’s game is not only engaging but also implicitly reinforces the idea that humans need to act “constantly” to “actually help.” In this respect, we recall Clement’s discussion of student’s models, which can represent a public articulation of a learner’s emergent understanding (Clement [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref106">12</reflink>] ).</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-29">Gender</hd> <p>While we do not discuss the ways in which gendered factors interacted with what the girls learned, we did purposefully select a focus on young women to test the efficacy of the program with girls. Overall, as we have shown, game design had positive effects on the girls’ learning, as others have also shown (Denner [<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref107">15</reflink>] ; Carbonero et al. [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref108">10</reflink>] ). Our assumptions about the appeal of focusing on action—designing games to teach others—and framing learning about climate change from a perspective that includes humans as actors who both cause climate change and can mitigate it were validated by our findings. Using game design as a teaching tool was a program-defined goal for the participants, and not one the girls chose themselves. Nevertheless, the girls took their role as “teacher” in designing their games with seriousness, for example, articulating clear, explicit, and relevant learning goals for intended players.</p> <p>Our findings accord with those of others—that girls consistently value learning experiences that are seen to be related to real-world problems and issues (Uitto et al. [<reflink idref="bib75" id="ref109">75</reflink>] ). The girls all expressed concern about humans’ role in climate change as an environmental issue of concern, as Britner ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref110">7</reflink>] ), Schoenberg et al. ([<reflink idref="bib68" id="ref111">68</reflink>] ), and Puttick et al. ([<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref112">58</reflink>] ) have also shown.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-30">Implications</hd> <hd id="AN0130147675-31">Game Design and Modeling</hd> <p>Parts of particular subsystems were more tractable than others for participants to model, given their levels of programming skill. We therefore included concept mapping as an activity that would support them in integrating these parts into a whole understanding of the Earth systems underpinning climate change. For example, in constructing the concept map model, the girls recognized reinforcing feedback loops, thus showing a grasp of the complexity of factors involved in climate change that their individual games did not demonstrate. Feedback loops in particular require a fair amount of Scratch programming experience since they involve not only defining variables—which the girls were able to do—but also the use of if-then statements. Although Scratch is intuitively easy to use, participants were only engaged in a total of 12 h of programming. Lengthier immersion in programming would have supported deeper levels of systems modeling in their games. In the future, we believe that, in addition, an intentional effort to locate participants’ individual games within a larger network of more explicit connections among the group’s games—perhaps as an additional programming task if time permits—would make the whole systems aspect of climate change more accessible.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-32">Gender</hd> <p>Our work points to ways in which educators can engage girls in science and in particular, computer science, in personally meaningful ways, and also adds to growing evidence of the efficacy of informal learning experiences in supporting girls’ learning and involvement in computing. For example, Denner ([<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref113">16</reflink>] ) and Hayes ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref114">32</reflink>] ) both suggest that gaming can be an engaging way to introduce computing for girls. This is encouraging in light of the findings of Bruckman et al. ([<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref115">8</reflink>] ), for example, who found that boys have significantly earlier experience programming than girls do, and those of Barron ([<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref116">4</reflink>] ) who, comparing boys and girls with similar levels of computer experience, found that the girls had significantly less programming experience. Recent findings show that the gap between girls and boys in time spent gaming—that is, in playing games—is narrowing (Hayes [<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref117">32</reflink>] ; Dresang et al. [<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref118">19</reflink>] ). We believe that learning experiences such as the one we describe here can contribute to narrowing the gap further, particularly in computer science, if young people are engaged in designing as well as playing games.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-33">Limitations</hd> <p>Limitations to the findings of our study include the small number of participants and the short time the girls had to engage with both climate and computer science. Additionally, girls made individual games. Thus, they had fewer chances to explain their decisions in a naturalistic setting. Girls were allowed to pursue their own interests and make games about what they wanted. This may have been in tension with learning, or internalizing, transforming, and externalizing fundamental dimensions of climate science. In more formal contexts, educators may want to be more directive about what learners make. Our study context was unique, and our findings can only show girls’ learning in this context (Erickson [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref119">22</reflink>] ). Therefore, while our codes might not have reached a saturation point necessary for grounded analysis, they are trustworthy for our unique context.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-34">Acknowledgements</hd> <p>We are grateful to TERC and the National Science Foundation (grant #1542954) for supporting this work and to Marian Grogan for her backup technical support during the workshop. This work grew out of an exploration of ideas with Teon Edwards and Lis Sylvan, to whom the first author is indebted.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-35">Compliance with Ethical Standards</hd> <p>All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.</p> <hd id="AN0130147675-36">References</hd> <hd id="AN0130147675-37">Citations</hd> <p>1 Adams, J. &amp; Webster, A. (2012). What do students learn about programming from game, music and storytelling projects?, Proceedings of the 43, rd, ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.</p> <ulist> <item>2 Ashcraft, C., Eger, E., &amp; Friend, M. (2012)., Girls in it: the facts. Report of the National Center for Women and Technology, Boulder CO, Retrieved November 30 2014, from, https://www.ncwit.org/sites/default/files/.../girlsinit_thefacts_fullreport2012.pdf,.</item> <item>3 Aydin, E. (2005). The use of computers in mathematics education: a paradigm shift from “computer assisted instruction” towards “student programming.”, The Turkish Online Journal of Educational Technology 4, NP.</item> <item>4 Barron B, Learning ecologies for technological fluency: gender and experience differences, Journal of Educational Computing Research, 2004, 31, 1, 1, 36, 10.2190/1N20-VV12-4RB5-33VA</item> <item>5 Basawapatna, A., Koh, K. &amp; Repenning, A. (2010). Using scalable game design to teach computer science from middle school to graduate school., Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, 224-228.</item> <item>6 Baytak A, Land SM, A case study of educational game design by kids and for kids, Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2010, 2, 2, 5242, 5246, 10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.03.853</item> <item>7 Britner, S. L. (2003). Environmental ethics in middle school students: analysis of the moral orientation of student responses to environment dilemmas., Research in Middle Level Education Online, 26(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref120">1</reflink>). Retrieved October 2015, from, http://www.nmsa.org/Publications/RMLEOnline/tabid/101/Default.aspx.</item> <item>8 Bruckman, A., Jensen, C., &amp; DeBonte, A. (2002). Gender and programming achievement in a CSCL environment., Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning: Foundations for a CSCL Community, CSCL, 119-127.</item> <item>9 Buckley BC, Interactive multimedia and model-based learning in biology, International Journal of Science Education, 2000, 22, 9, 895, 935, 10.1080/095006900416848</item> <item>10 Carbonero M, Szafron D, Cutumisu M, Schaeffer J, Computer-game construction: a gender-neutral attractor to computer science, Computers and Education, 2010, 55, 3, 1098, 1111, 10.1016/j.compedu.2010.05.007</item> <item>11 Charmaz K, Constructing grounded theory: a practical guide, 2006, London, Sage</item> <item>12 Clement J, Model based learning as a key research area for science education, International Journal of Science Education, 2000, 22, 9, 1041, 1053, 10.1080/095006900416901</item> <item>13 Clement JJ, Rea-Ramirez MA, Model based learning and instruction in science, 2008, New York, Springer Publishing</item> <item>14 Creswell JW, Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, 2014, 4, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications</item> <item>15 Denner, J. (2007). The girls creating games program: an innovative approach to integrating technology into middle school., Meridian: A Middle School Computer Technologies Journal, 10(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref121">1</reflink>)., http://www.ncsu.edu/meridian/win2007/girlgaming/index.htm.</item> <item>16 Denner, J. (2011). What predicts middle school girls’ interest in computing?, International Journal of Gender in Science, Engineering, and Technology, 3(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref122">1</reflink>).</item> <item>17 Denner J, Werner L, Ortiz E, Computer games created by middle school girls: can they be used to measure understanding of computer science concepts?, Computers and Education, 2010, 58, 1, 240, 249, 10.1016/j.compedu.2011.08.006</item> <item>18 DiSessa AD, Metarepresentation: native competence and targets for instruction, Cognition and Instruction, 2004, 22, 3, 293, 331, 10.1207/s1532690xci2203_2</item> <item>19 Dresang ET, Gross M, Holt L, New perspectives: an analysis of gender, net-generation children, and computers, Library Trends, 2007, 56, 2, 360, 386, 10.1353/lib.2008.0008</item> <item>20 Duschl R, Green J, Luke A, Kelly G, Science education in three part harmony: balancing conceptual, epistemic, and social learning goals, Review of Research in Education, 2008, Washington, DC, American Educational Research Association</item> <item>21 Egenfeldt-Nielsen S, Educational potential of computer games, 2007, New York, Bloomsbury Academic</item> <item>22 Erickson, F. (1986). Qualitative methods in research on teaching. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), The handbook of research on teaching, Third Edition (pp. 119-161). New York: Macmillan.</item> <item>23 Girls RISE Network. (2013). Girls, equity and STEM in informal learning settings: a review of literature., http://girlsrisenet.org/sites/default/files/SAVI%20Lit%20Review%20Sept%202013.pdf. Accessed 30 June 2014.</item> <item>24 Glaser B, Strauss A, The discovery of grounded theory: strategies for qualitative research, 1967, Hawthorne, Aldine</item> <item>25 Glasslab. (2014)., Psychometric considerations in game-based assessment. 160 pp., instituteofplay.org. Accessed October 21 2014.</item> <item>26 Goh, S., Yoon, S., Wang, J., Yang, Z. &amp; Klopfer, E. (2012). Investigating the relative difficulty of complex systems ideas in biology., 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences: The Future of Learning, Sydney, Australia, July, 2012., www.isls.org/icls2012/downloads/ICLS2012%20Program.pdf. Accessed 11 Nov 2014.</item> <item>27 Gooding DC, Visualizing scientific inference, Topics in Cognitive Science, 2004, 2, 15, 35, 10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01048.x</item> <item>28 Gotwals, A. W., &amp; Songer, N. B. (2010). Reasoning and down a food chain: using an assessment framework to investigate students’ middle knowledge. 10.1002/sce.20368.</item> <item>29 Greeno J, Hall RP, Practicing with representations: learning with and about representational forms, Phi Delta Kappan, 1998, 78, 5, 361, 367</item> <item>30 Grotzer T, Learning to understand the forms of causality implicit in scientific explanations, Studies in Science Education, 2003, 39, 1, 1, 74, 10.1080/03057260308560195</item> <item>31 Grotzer T, Lincoln R, Moser S, Dilling L, Educating for “intelligent environmental action” in an age of global warming, Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change, 2007, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 266, 280</item> <item>32 Hayes E, Kafai YB, Heeter C, Denner J, Sun JY, Girls, gaming and trajectories of IT expertise, Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, 2008, Cambridge, MIT Press, 217, 230</item> <item>33 Helms, M., Vattam, S., &amp; Goel, A. (2010). The effect of functional modeling on understanding complex biological systems. Proceedings of the America Society of Mechanical Engineers 2010 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences &amp; Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.</item> <item>34 Hill C, Corbett C, St. Rose A, Why so few? Women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, 2010, Washington, DC, American Association of University Women</item> <item>35 Hmelo-Silver C, Pfeffer M, Comparing expert and novice understanding of a complex system from the perspective of structure, behaviors, and functions, Cognitive Science, 2004, 1, 127, 138, 10.1207/s15516709cog2801_7</item> <item>36 Hmelo-Silver C, Holton D, Kolodner J, Designing to learn about complex systems, Journal of Learning Sciences, 2000, 9, 3, 247, 298, 10.1207/S15327809JLS0903_2</item> <item>37 Hodari AK, Ko L, Ong M, Smith JM, Enacting agency: the strategies of women in color in computing, Computing in Science and Engineering, 2016, 18, 3, 58, 68, 10.1109/MCSE.2016.44</item> <item>38 Ingham AM, Gilbert JK, The use of analogue models by students of chemistry at higher education level, International Journal of Science Education, 1991, 13, 2, 193, 202, 10.1080/0950069910130206</item> <item>39 Hoover, A.K., Barnes, K., Fatehi, B., Moreno-Leon, J., Puttick, G., Tucker-Raymond, E. &amp; Harteveld, C. (2016). Assessing computational thinking in students’ game designs. Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI).</item> <item>40 Kafai Y, Franke M, Ching C, Shih J, Game design as an interactive learning environment for fostering students’ and teachers’ mathematical inquiry, International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning, 1998, 3, 2, 149, 184, 10.1023/A:1009777905226</item> <item>41 Kamarainen AM, Metcalf S, Grotzer TA, Dede C, Exploring ecosystems from the inside: how immersive multi-user virtual environments can support development of epistemologically grounded modeling practices in ecosystem science instruction, Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2015, 24, 2, 148, 167, 10.1007/s10956-014-9531-7</item> <item>42 Khalili N, Sheridan K, Williams A, Clark K, Stegman M, Students designing video games about immunology: insights for science learning, Computers in the Schools, 2011, 28, 3, 228, 240, 10.1080/07380569.2011.594988</item> <item>43 Lave J, Wenger E, Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation, 1991, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press</item> <item>44 Lee J, Husman J, Scott KA, Eggum-Wilkens ND, COMPUGIRLS: stepping stone to future computer-based technology pathways, Journal of Educational Computing Research., 2015, 52, 2, 199, 223, 10.1177/0735633115571304</item> <item>45 Lee I, Martin F, Apone K, Integrating computational thinking across the K-8 curriculum, ACM Inroads, 2014, 5, 4, 64, 71, 10.1145/2684721.2684736</item> <item>46 Lehrer R, Schauble L, Damon W, Lerner R, Renninger KA, Sigel IE, I.E., Scientific thinking and science literacy, Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Cognitive Processes, 2006, Hoboken NJ, Wiley, 153, 196</item> <item>47 Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., &amp; Smith, N. (2011). Global warming’s 6 Americas May 2011. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.</item> <item>48 Maloney, J., Resnick, M., Rusk, N., Silverman, B., &amp; Eastmond, E. (2010). The Scratch programming language and environment., ACM Transactions on Computing Education, 10(<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref123">4</reflink>).</item> <item>49 McNeill K, Libarkin J, Ledley T, Bardar E, Haddad N, Ellins K, Dutta S, The role of research in online curriculum development: the case of EarthLabs climate change and Earth systems modules, Journal of Geoscience Education, 2014, 62, 4, 560, 577, 10.5408/13-060.1</item> <item>50 Michaels, S., O’Connor, C., &amp; Resnick, L. (2008). Reasoned Participation: Accountable Talk in the Classroom and in Civic Life., Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27(<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref124">4</reflink>), 283-297.</item> <item>51 Miles M, Huberman A, Qualitative data analysis: an expanded source book, 1994, Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications</item> <item>52 Mohan L, Chen J, Anderson CW, Developing a multi-year learning progression for carbon cycling in socio-ecological systems, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2009, 46, 6, 675, 698, 10.1002/tea.20314</item> <item>53 Nagel, E. (1961)., The structure of science. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World.</item> <item>54 Orion N, Ault CR, Jr, Lederman N, Abell S, Learning earth sciences, The Handbook of Research on Science Teaching, 2006, Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum</item> <item>55 Osborne J, Dillon J, Science education in Europe: critical reflections, 2008, London, The Nuffield Foundation</item> <item>56 Papert S, Harel I, Situating constructionism, Constructionism, 1991, 36, 1, 11</item> <item>57 Penner, D. A. (2000). Explaining systems investigating middle school students’ understanding of emergent phenomena., Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37(<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref125">8</reflink>), 784-806.</item> <item>58 Puttick, G., Bernstein, D. &amp; Edwards, T. (2017). Design based research study of a girl scout program focused on energy conservation. Educational Researcher (to appear).</item> <item>59 Puttick, G., Tucker-Raymond, E. &amp; Barnes, J. (2016). Environmental attitudes in youth-created computer games about climate change. Proceedings of the Games+Learning+Society 12 conference, August 2016, Madison WI.</item> <item>60 Puttick G, Strawhacker A, Bernstein D, Sylvan E, Its not as bad as using the toaster all the time. Trade offs in a Scratch game about energy use, Proceedings of the International Conference on the Learning Sciences 2014, 2014, 3, 1485, 1486</item> <item>61 Repenning, A., Webb, D., &amp; Ioannidou, A. (2010). Scalable game design and the development of a checklist for getting computational thinking into public schools. In, Proceedings of the 41st Association for Computing Machinery’s Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 265-269.</item> <item>62 Resnick, M., Maloney, J., Monroy-Hernández, A., Rusk, N., Eastmond, E., Brennan, K., Millner, A., Rosenbaum, E., Silver, J., Silverman, B., Kafai, Y. (2009). Scratch: Programming for all., Communications of the ACM, 52, 60-67. 10.1145/1592761.1592779.</item> <item>63 Riess, W., &amp; Mischo, C. (2010). Promoting systems thinking through biology lessons. doi: 10.1080/09500690902769946.</item> <item>64 Robinson A, Perez-Quinones M, Scales G, African-American middle school girls: influences on attitudes toward computer science, Computing in Science &amp; Engineering, 2016, 18, 3, 14, 23, 10.1109/MCSE.2016.43</item> <item>65 Sabelli NH, Complexity, technology, science, and education, Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2006, 15, 1, 5, 9, 10.1207/s15327809jls1501_3</item> <item>66 Salen K, Gaming literacies: a game design study in action, Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 2007, 16, 3, 301, 322</item> <item>67 Salen K, Zimmerman E, Rules of play, Game design fundamentals, 2004, Cambridge, MIT Press</item> <item>68 Schoenberg, J., Salmond, K., &amp; Fleshman, P. (2008). Change It Up! What girls say about redefining leadership. New York. Retrieved November 1, 2008, from, http://www.girlscouts.org/research.</item> <item>69 Schwandt TA, Lincoln NK, Guba YL, Constructivist, interpretivist approaches to human inquiry, The Handbook of Qualitative Research, 1994, Thousand Oaks, Sage, 118, 137</item> <item>70 Sjoberg, S. &amp; Schreiner, C. (2010). The ROSE project: an overview and key findings., http://www.roseproject.no/network/countries/norway/eng/nor-Sjoberg-Schreiner-overview-2010.pdf. Accessed March 14 2014.</item> <item>71 Songer N, Kelcey B, Gotwals A, How and when does complex reasoning occur? Empirically driven development of a learning progression focused on complex reasoning about biodiversity, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2009, 46, 6, 610, 631, 10.1002/tea.20313</item> <item>72 Sterelny K, Schantz R, Externalism, epistemic artifacts and the extended mind, The Externalist Challenge. New Studies on Cognition and Intentionality, 2005, Berlin and New York, De Gruyter, 239, 254</item> <item>73 Tucker-Raymond E, Torres-Petrovich D, Dumbleton K, Damlich E, Alvermann D, Hinchman K, Reconceptualizing together: Exploring participatory and productive media literacies in a collaborative teacher research group, Reconceptualizing literacies in adolescents’ lives, 2012, New York, Routledge, 224, 243</item> <item>74 Tutwiler MS, Grotzer T, Saleh I, Why immersive, interactive simulation belongs in the pedagogical toolkit of “next generation” science: facilitating student understanding of complex causal dynamics, Approaches and Strategies in Next Generation Science Learning, 2013, Hershey, IGI Global, 127, 146</item> <item>75 Uitto A, Juuti K, Lavonen J, Meisalo V, Students’ interest in biology and their out-of-school experiences, Journal of Biology Education, 2005, 40, 3, 124, 129, 10.1080/00219266.2006.9656029</item> <item>76 Vygotsky L, Mind and society: the development of higher psychological processes, 1978, Cambridge, Harvard University Press</item> <item>77 Weintrop, D., Beheshti, E., Horn, M., Orton, K., Jona, K., Trouille, L., &amp; Wilensky, U. (2015). Defining computational thinking for mathematics and science classrooms., Journal of Science Education and Technology, 25(<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref126">1</reflink>), 127-147.</item> <item>78 Werner L, Denner J, Campe S, Annetta L, Minogue J, Learn engineering practices using game design and creation, Achieving Science and Technological Literacy Through Engineering Design Practices, 2014, New York, Springer</item> <item>79 Wilensky U, Jacobson M, Sawyer K, Complex systems and the learning sciences, The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, 2014, 2, New York, Cambridge University Press, 319, 338</item> <item>80 Windschitl, M. (2013). Models and modeling: an introduction. Retrieved November 19, 2016 from, ambitiousscienceteaching.org</item> </ulist> <p>PHOTO (COLOR)</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR)</p> <p>PHOTO (COLOR)</p> <aug> <p>By Gillian Puttick and Eli Tucker-Raymond</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib3" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib78" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib60" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib66" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib73" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib61" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib6" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref11"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib74" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib65" firstref="ref15"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib71" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib54" firstref="ref17"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref18"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref20"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref21"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib63" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib57" firstref="ref23"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref24"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib79" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib26" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref31"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib76" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib46" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref36"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib43" firstref="ref37"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib56" firstref="ref38"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref39"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib72" firstref="ref40"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib1" firstref="ref42"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref43"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib62" firstref="ref44"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib5" firstref="ref45"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib59" firstref="ref49"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref50"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl44" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl45" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref54"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl46" bibid="bib9" firstref="ref55"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl47" bibid="bib80" firstref="ref56"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl48" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref57"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl49" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref60"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl50" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref62"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl51" bibid="bib53" firstref="ref63"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl52" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref64"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl53" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref67"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl54" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref68"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl55" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref69"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl56" bibid="bib64" firstref="ref70"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl57" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref71"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl58" bibid="bib2" firstref="ref72"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl59" bibid="bib55" firstref="ref73"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl60" bibid="bib7" firstref="ref74"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl61" bibid="bib68" firstref="ref75"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl62" bibid="bib58" firstref="ref76"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl63" bibid="bib70" firstref="ref77"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl64" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref83"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl65" bibid="bib69" firstref="ref85"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl66" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref86"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl67" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref88"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl68" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref89"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl69" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref90"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl70" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref91"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl71" bibid="bib77" firstref="ref93"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl72" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref94"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl73" bibid="bib67" firstref="ref103"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl74" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref104"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl75" bibid="bib75" firstref="ref109"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl76" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref114"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl77" bibid="bib8" firstref="ref115"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl78" bibid="bib4" firstref="ref116"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl79" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref118"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl80" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref119"></nolink> |
|---|---|
| Header | DbId: eric DbLabel: ERIC An: EJ1182432 AccessLevel: 3 PubType: Academic Journal PubTypeId: academicJournal PreciseRelevancyScore: 0 |
| IllustrationInfo | |
| Items | – Name: Title Label: Title Group: Ti Data: Building Systems from Scratch: An Exploratory Study of Students Learning about Climate Change – Name: Language Label: Language Group: Lang Data: English – Name: Author Label: Authors Group: Au Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Puttick%2C+Gillian%22">Puttick, Gillian</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0157-3778">0000-0003-0157-3778</externalLink>)<br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Tucker-Raymond%2C+Eli%22">Tucker-Raymond, Eli</searchLink> – Name: TitleSource Label: Source Group: Src Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Journal+of+Science+Education+and+Technology%22"><i>Journal of Science Education and Technology</i></searchLink>. Aug 2018 27(4):306-321. – Name: Avail Label: Availability Group: Avail Data: Springer. Available from: Springer Nature. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-348-4505; e-mail: customerservice@springernature.com; Web site: https://link.springer.com/ – Name: PeerReviewed Label: Peer Reviewed Group: SrcInfo Data: Y – Name: Pages Label: Page Count Group: Src Data: 16 – Name: DatePubCY Label: Publication Date Group: Date Data: 2018 – Name: SourceSuprt Label: Sponsoring Agency Group: SrcSuprt Data: National Science Foundation (NSF) – Name: NumberContract Label: Contract Number Group: NumCntrct Data: 1542954 – Name: TypeDocument Label: Document Type Group: TypDoc Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research – Name: Audience Label: Education Level Group: Audnce Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Middle+Schools%22">Middle Schools</searchLink> – Name: Subject Label: Descriptors Group: Su Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Climate%22">Climate</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Systems+Building%22">Systems Building</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Workshops%22">Workshops</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Middle+School+Students%22">Middle School Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Females%22">Females</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Programming%22">Programming</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Visualization%22">Visualization</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Video+Games%22">Video Games</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Design%22">Design</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Qualitative+Research%22">Qualitative Research</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Science+Process+Skills%22">Science Process Skills</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Learning+Experience%22">Learning Experience</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Design+Preferences%22">Design Preferences</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Science+Activities%22">Science Activities</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Hands+on+Science%22">Hands on Science</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Teaching+Methods%22">Teaching Methods</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Student+Satisfaction%22">Student Satisfaction</searchLink> – Name: DOI Label: DOI Group: ID Data: 10.1007/s10956-017-9725-x – Name: ISSN Label: ISSN Group: ISSN Data: 1059-0145 – Name: Abstract Label: Abstract Group: Ab Data: Science and computational practices such as modeling and abstraction are critical to understanding the complex systems that are integral to climate science. Given the demonstrated affordances of game design in supporting such practices, we implemented a free 4-day intensive workshop for middle school girls that focused on using the visual programming environment, Scratch, to design games to teach others about climate change. The experience was carefully constructed so that girls of widely differing levels of experience were able to engage in a cycle of game design. This qualitative study aimed to explore the representational choices the girls made as they took up aspects of climate change systems and modeled them in their games. Evidence points to the ways in which designing games about climate science fostered emergent systems thinking and engagement in modeling practices as learners chose what to represent in their games, grappled with the realism of their respective representations, and modeled interactions among systems components. Given the girls' levels of programming skill, parts of systems were more tractable to create than others. The educational purpose of the games was important to the girls' overall design experience, since it influenced their choice of topic, and challenged their emergent understanding of climate change as a systems problem. – Name: AbstractInfo Label: Abstractor Group: Ab Data: As Provided – Name: Ref Label: Number of References Group: RefInfo Data: 80 – Name: DateEntry Label: Entry Date Group: Date Data: 2018 – Name: AN Label: Accession Number Group: ID Data: EJ1182432 |
| PLink | https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=eric&AN=EJ1182432 |
| RecordInfo | BibRecord: BibEntity: Identifiers: – Type: doi Value: 10.1007/s10956-017-9725-x Languages: – Text: English PhysicalDescription: Pagination: PageCount: 16 StartPage: 306 Subjects: – SubjectFull: Climate Type: general – SubjectFull: Systems Building Type: general – SubjectFull: Workshops Type: general – SubjectFull: Middle School Students Type: general – SubjectFull: Females Type: general – SubjectFull: Programming Type: general – SubjectFull: Visualization Type: general – SubjectFull: Video Games Type: general – SubjectFull: Design Type: general – SubjectFull: Qualitative Research Type: general – SubjectFull: Science Process Skills Type: general – SubjectFull: Learning Experience Type: general – SubjectFull: Design Preferences Type: general – SubjectFull: Science Activities Type: general – SubjectFull: Hands on Science Type: general – SubjectFull: Teaching Methods Type: general – SubjectFull: Student Satisfaction Type: general Titles: – TitleFull: Building Systems from Scratch: An Exploratory Study of Students Learning about Climate Change Type: main BibRelationships: HasContributorRelationships: – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Puttick, Gillian – PersonEntity: Name: NameFull: Tucker-Raymond, Eli IsPartOfRelationships: – BibEntity: Dates: – D: 01 M: 08 Type: published Y: 2018 Identifiers: – Type: issn-print Value: 1059-0145 Numbering: – Type: volume Value: 27 – Type: issue Value: 4 Titles: – TitleFull: Journal of Science Education and Technology Type: main |
| ResultId | 1 |
