TY - GEN
T1 - A testbed for fun and effective features in spatial skill training games
AU - Wauck, Helen
AU - Bailey, Brian
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Zhengqi Feng for his valuable insights and work on the Construction Mode tutorial and Sebastian Saraceno for his original in-game music compositions. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE - 1144245.
PY - 2019/10/17
Y1 - 2019/10/17
N2 - Certain digital games hold promise as interventions for training spatial skills, a subset of cognitive skills essential for success in STEM fields. However, not much is known about what features of these games are relevant to training spatial skills. Without such knowledge, it is impossible to design spatial skill training games with confidence that they will be effective. In addition, existing games for spatial skill training are not designed to appeal to those who stand the most to benefit from them: students with low spatial skill. In this work, we present a new and improved version of Homeworld Bound, a game designed as a testbed for studying spatially relevant game features. Our updated version is grounded in spatial skill theory and designed to appeal to low spatial skill university students. We present our future plans for analyzing the training effectiveness and player experience of this new game, Homeworld Bound: Redux.
AB - Certain digital games hold promise as interventions for training spatial skills, a subset of cognitive skills essential for success in STEM fields. However, not much is known about what features of these games are relevant to training spatial skills. Without such knowledge, it is impossible to design spatial skill training games with confidence that they will be effective. In addition, existing games for spatial skill training are not designed to appeal to those who stand the most to benefit from them: students with low spatial skill. In this work, we present a new and improved version of Homeworld Bound, a game designed as a testbed for studying spatially relevant game features. Our updated version is grounded in spatial skill theory and designed to appeal to low spatial skill university students. We present our future plans for analyzing the training effectiveness and player experience of this new game, Homeworld Bound: Redux.
KW - Cognitive skills
KW - Educational games
KW - Player experience
KW - STEM education
KW - Spatial skills
KW - Students
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074867435&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85074867435&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3341215.3356298
DO - 10.1145/3341215.3356298
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85074867435
T3 - CHI PLAY 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
SP - 763
EP - 771
BT - CHI PLAY 2019 - Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 6th ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, CHI PLAY 2019
Y2 - 22 October 2019 through 25 October 2019
ER -