TY - GEN
T1 - A player-centric approach to designing spatial skill training games
AU - Wauck, Helen
AU - Mekler, Elisa D.
AU - Fu, Wai Tat
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Jamie Lee for assistance with survey design and India Owens for assistance with proctoring. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE - 1144245.
PY - 2019/5/2
Y1 - 2019/5/2
N2 - Certain video games show promise as tools for training spatial skills, one of the strongest predictors of future success in STEM. However, little is known about the gaming preferences of those who would benefit the most from such interventions: low spatial skill students. To provide guidance on how to design training games for this population, we conducted a survey of 350 participants from three populations: online college-age, students from a low SES high school, and students from a high SES high school. Participants took a timed test of spatial skills and then answered questions about their demographics, gameplay habits, preferences, and motivations. The only predictors of spatial skill were gender and population: female participants from online and low SES high school populations had the lowest spatial skill. In light of these findings, we provide design recommendations for game-based spatial skill interventions targeting low spatial skill students.
AB - Certain video games show promise as tools for training spatial skills, one of the strongest predictors of future success in STEM. However, little is known about the gaming preferences of those who would benefit the most from such interventions: low spatial skill students. To provide guidance on how to design training games for this population, we conducted a survey of 350 participants from three populations: online college-age, students from a low SES high school, and students from a high SES high school. Participants took a timed test of spatial skills and then answered questions about their demographics, gameplay habits, preferences, and motivations. The only predictors of spatial skill were gender and population: female participants from online and low SES high school populations had the lowest spatial skill. In light of these findings, we provide design recommendations for game-based spatial skill interventions targeting low spatial skill students.
KW - Cognitive training
KW - Emotions
KW - Gender
KW - Motivation
KW - Spatial reasoning
KW - Video games
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85067632580&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/3290605.3300296
DO - 10.1145/3290605.3300296
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85067632580
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2019
Y2 - 4 May 2019 through 9 May 2019
ER -