In January, the CET will release its newest version called Selene.
Director of the Center for Educational Technologies® at WheelingJesuitUniversity, Chuck Wood said his team created the videogame Selene to help spark young people’s interest in science.
“We want to give kids a hands on experience using the tools they are familiar with to learn educational material and in particular, information about how something that is in their life every day by looking up in the sky and seeing how it was made and how it evolved over time, so part of our project is to have activities after they play the game that direct them outside to look at the moon with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope,” said Wood.
In 2006, WJU researchers started working on CyGaMEs, which stands for Cyberlearning through Game-based, Metaphor Enhanced Learning Objects.
The university received funding from NASA for the project, and this research resulted in the creation of the Selene videogame. The game currently is undergoing several upgrades and changes thanks to a 2 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
Selene is the Greek word for moon and is used to refer to anything about the study of the moon. Head Researcher Debbie Reese, said the video game lets the user construct the moon.
“When the Selene game starts what is happening is that there has been a giant impact and all the debris from that impact has formed a shell around the Earth and created a ring and the player is in the ring. The players in the ring and the idea is that you click on these particles and you actually grow the moon,” she said.
Users also get to change the moon’s surface in the game over time, by hitting it with craters and flooding it with lava. Selene also teaches science concepts like density, gravity and kinetic energy.
But one of the most unique aspects of the game is the embedded assessments Reese created to measure how and when a student is learning.
“You can see the moment that she learned according that she learned in the velocity gestures is right here. See the line here how it is level and how it grows? That shows she was not progressing toward the game goal but as soon as she learned it there is her progress toward the game goal,” said Reese.
Reese’s research caught the interest of Larry Hedges, a nationally recognized statistician and professor at NorthwesternUniversity. He recently joined the CyGaMEs project and said the video game research at WheelingJesuitUniversity is groundbreaking.
“It is an example of how to do things that people in the abstract world have talked about for a long time but it is one thing to talk about it and one thing to create a working model that is doing it and I think that is what Selene has done, it has broken new ground by actually doing a variety of things like embedded assessment, things like monitoring the motivation of students so I think that is fascinating,” said Hedges.
In Early November, Reese showcased her videogame research to members of Congress during an educational tech expo on Capitol Hill. She is looking for volunteer recruiters to help grow the project. To learn more or to play Selene, click here.