Search

IJRP 13: Full Issue Table of Contents Sarah Lynne Bowman, William J. White, and Evan Torner, "Editorial: Transformative Play Seminar 2022: Education,Personal Development, and Meaning Making” This special issue is the first of a two-part series collecting the short articles presented during the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar, held at Uppsala University Campus Gotland in Visby, Sweden on October 20-21, 2022. Maryanne Cullinanand Jennifer Genova, “Gaming the Systems: A Component Analysis Frameworkfor the Classroom Use of RPGs” This article presents guidelines for constructing educational experiences with learning role-playing games (LRPGs) based on specific learning objectives, including academic skills, social emotional skills, and executive functioning skills. Josefin Westborg, “The Educational Role-Playing Game Design Matrix:Mapping Design Components onto Types of Education” This article offers categories for understanding different facets of learning and role-playing games, including setting, purpose, framing, type of processing, and learning objectives. Types of games categorized include leisure, stand-alone educational RPGs, RPGs in education, and Educational RPGs. Aditya Anupam, "Playing the Belly of the Beast: Games for Learning Strategic Thinking in Tech Ethics" This article discusses the design of an interactive digital narrative the author is developing called Lights Out Warehouse, which is geared toward engineering students in universities. The game explores ethical issues around automated labor and organizing. Xiong Shuo,Ruoyu Wen, andHuijuan Zheng, “The Player Category Research of Murder Mystery Games” This article introduces the development process of Jubensha in China. Inspired by Bartle’s (1996) Player Taxonomy the authors build a model of a player typology for MMG, including the professor, braggart, conqueror, detective, actor, politician, socializer, and viewer. Miguel Angel BastarracheaMagnani, “A Coin with Two Sides:Role-Playing Games as Symbolic Devices” This article explores RPGs through the lens of philosophy and depth psychology. He discusses their ritual and mythic nature and how these elements converge as symbols. Ayça Durmus andSedef Topcuoglu, “Self Arcana: A Self-Reflective, Story-Based Tarot Game” This article discusses the development of Self Arcana, a role-playing game involving drawing one’s own tarot cards and engaging in storytelling in order to achieve greater self-insight. The authors offer a duoethnography featuring their experiences designing and playing the game. Giuseppe Femia, “A Reparative Play in Dungeons & Dragons” This article highlights RPGs’ potential for reparative play in which participants can express queer identities. The author includes an autoethnographic account of his experiences in Dungeons & Dragons, which allowed him to express his assexuality in meaningful ways. Albert R. Spencer, “The Vampire Foucault:Erotic Horror Role-Playing Games as a Technologies of the Self” This article describes the potential of erotic horror role-playing games such as in the World of Darkness to provide opportunities for transformative bleed.

Digital games are increasingly being used to teach the processes of scientific inquiry. These games often make at least one of four key assumptions about scientific inquiry: that inquiry is a problem-solving process which is value-neutral, bounded by strict subject-matter constraints, and conducted by practitioners separable from society. However, feminist, STS, and pragmatist scholars have demonstrated the flawed nature of these assumptions. They highlight instead that: inquiry is a process of problematization that is value-laden, unbounded by subject-matter, and conducted by practitioners who socially, politically, and culturally situated. In this paper, I argue that three of the key affordances of digital games-their procedural, evaluative, and fictional qualities-can constrain their ability to teach inquiry understood as such. I examine these affordances and their relationship to the nature of scientific inquiry through a design case examining our game Solaria designed to teach students how to inquire into the development of solar cells. Specifically, I ask: To what extent can the procedural, evaluative, and fictional affordances of digital games (designed to teach students about solar cells) support the learning of scientific inquiry as a problematizing, situated, and value-laden process, unbounded by subject-matter constraints? I discuss how these affordances of games supported but ultimately limited the design of the game by trivializing real situations, predetermining criteria for progress, and distancing students from real-world risks and responsibilities, respectively. In conclusion, I briefly discuss how understanding these limitations can support the design of educational environments to complement digital games for teaching scientific inquiry.

How do materials and making come to matter in the messy practices of feminist teaching? This Lab Meeting shares examples of interdisciplinary work in feminist making and teaching across a range of contexts (AI portraiture, printmaking, quilting, musical performance, game design, theater, storytelling, and more) to extend the discussion of materials in feminist thought, a topic of long-standing importance in the field. As a group of theorist-practitioners, the contributors to the Lab Meeting share an interest in bridging the conceptual and material via a scrappy mode of making and inquiry that does not seek to remediate chaos but rather engage it, in all its complexities. Each contributor captures multiple interpretations of mess, making, storytelling, and education from a feminist perspective. Together, they offer insights into the liberatory promise of material engagements.

In this article, we provide an extensive overview of a wide range of quantum games and interactive tools that have been employed by the community in recent years. The paper presents selected tools, as described by their developers. The list includes Hello Quantum, Hello Qiskit, Particle in a Box, Psi and Delta, QPlayLearn, Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap, Quantum Odyssey, ScienceAtHome, and The Virtual Quantum Optics Laboratory. Additionally, we present events for quantum game development: hackathons, game jams, and semester projects. Furthermore, we discuss the Quantum Technologies Education for Everyone (QUTE4E) pilot project, which illustrates an effective integration of these interactive tools with quantum outreach and education activities. Finally, we aim at providing guidelines for incorporating quantum games and interactive tools in pedagogic materials to make quantum technologies more accessible for a wider population., 39 pages, 17 figures

Threat moderation on social media has been subject to much public debate and criticism, especially for its broadly permissive approach. In this paper, we focus on Twitter's Violent Threats policy, highlighting its shortcomings by comparing it to linguistic and legal threat assessment frameworks. Specifically, we foreground the importance of accounting for the lived experiences of harassment—how people perceive and react to a tweet—a measure largely disregarded by Twitter's Violent Threats policy but a core part of linguistic and legal threat assessment frameworks. To illustrate this, we examine three tweets by drawing upon these frameworks. These tweets showcase the racist, sexist, and abusive language used in threats towards those who have been marginalized. Through our analysis, we highlight how content moderation policies, despite their stated goal of promoting free speech, in effect, work to inhibit it by fostering an online toxic environment that precipitates self-censorship in fear of violence and retaliation. In doing so, we make a case for technology designers and policy makers working in the sphere of content moderation to craft approaches that incorporate the various nuanced dimensions of threat assessment toward a more inclusive and open environment for online discourse. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains strong and violent language. Please use discretion when reading, printing, or recommending this paper.

The abstract nature of quantum mechanics makes it difficult to visualize. This is one of the reasons it is taught in the language of mathematics. Without an opportunity to directly observe or interact with quantum phenomena, students struggle to develop conceptual understandings of its theories and formulas. In this paper we present the process of designing a digital game that supplements introductory quantum mechanics curricula. We present our design process anchored on three key challenges: 1) drawing upon students’ past experiences and knowledge of classical mechanics while at the same time helping them break free of it to understand the unique qualities and characteristics of quantum mechanics; 2) creating an environment that is accurate in its depiction of the mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics while also playful and engaging for students; and 3) developing characters that are relatable to players but also do not reinforce gender stereotypes. Our design process can serve as a useful resource for educational game designers by providing a model for addressing these challenges.

In order to understand a pandemic like the COVID-19 crisis of 2020, we have to keep in mind larger patterns (e.g., information visualizations such as charts), and individual perspectives (e.g., interviews). However, it is challenging to connect these larger patterns with lived experiences. In this work-in-progress paper, we argue that interactive digital experiences such as games have the potential to bridge this gap by allowing players to explore the pandemic at multiple levels of abstraction. We present Essential Workers: an online multiplayer game which situates players as one of four workers?Nurse, Grocery Worker, Office Worker, or Delivery Driver?who face difficult dilemmas as they live through three weeks of rising infection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a core cooperative game mechanic, Essential Workers seeks to tie the constraints and choices of the individual to the health of their communities, and to simulate some of the interdependencies that keep our communities functional during the pandemic. We aim to illustrate our approach to key challenges commonly faced by designers seeking to model the entanglements of the individual and society.

Quantum mechanics (QMs) is a foundational subject in many science and engineering fields. It is difficult to teach, however, as it requires a fundamental revision of the assumptions and laws of classical physics and probability. Furthermore, introductory QM courses and texts predominantly focus on the mathematical formulations of the subject and lay less emphasis on its conceptual understanding. Consequently, students struggle to build robust mental models of the concepts. This paper posits that games can provide an effective platform for an experiential and conceptual understanding of introductory QM. Games are particularly suitable for demonstrating QM characteristics because their repetitive nature is conducive to demonstrating probability concepts that form a core part of QM. Games can also immerse students in an engaging environment that motivates them to learn. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a digital game for learning introductory QM concepts. The evaluation of the game indicates an improvement in students’ conceptual understanding of probability. Students also reported an increase in comfort level with key concepts taught in the game.

Given the rise of scientific misinformation, there is a critical need for students to learn the practices of scientific inquiry along with scientific concepts. In this work-in-progress paper, we posit that digital games are conducive to learning both as they enable collaborative virtual scientific experimentation and modeling. We put forward design guidelines for games that facilitate such learning. We then illustrate one instance of employing these guidelines in the design of Psi and Delta, a collaborative science game to help students learn the basic concepts of quantum mechanics through inquiry.

Assessment of students' conceptual knowledge is a difficult task in all fields including electrical engineering. Recently, electrical engineering assessments have tried to isolate various types of knowledge through expert reviewed and validated tests or concept inventories, which attempt to cover the foundational concepts within a particular domain. While these tests have been fundamental in uncovering how students understand important concepts within specialties, they are traditionally administered on a static 2D interface without providing the students with tangible examples to think with or about. We report on a qualitative laboratory study to understand how different tools can change the possibilities and limitations of thinking with circuits. Specifically, we administer two versions of an assessment targeting concepts in direct current (DC) circuits in which students talked through their reasoning. One version represents the circuits as conventional symbolic diagrams, and the other version represents the circuits using physical circuit components connected with wires and solder. The participants conveyed several misconceptions within both forms with an even spread across each assessment. However, students exhibited the misconception of sequential reasoning more prevalently in the physical circuit assessment than the diagram assessment.

Building physical computing projects can enable learners to integrate computing into a range of interests and disciplines. However, the electronic portion of these projects can be difficult. Students are learning new concepts as well as how to work with new tools. This influx of information can be difficult for students to retain in their working memory as they construct their circuits. In this paper, we introduce BitBlox, a set of modular, solderless Breadboards for prototyping circuits. BitBlox attempts to decrease the cognitive load on the user by reducing the complexity found in the standard Breadboard by bringing visibility to the underlying connections within its modules. We present a comparative classroom study integrating the Breadboard and BitBlox into two different high school classes. Our qualitative analysis focuses on student errors, strategies, and collaborative practices, highlighting important dynamics for designing hardware tools.