CI-TEAM Demo: Collaborative Games for Bioinformatics Education

CI-TEAM 演示：生物信息学教育协作游戏

• 批准号: 1135479
• 负责人: Cecilia Aragon
• 金额: $ 25万
• 依托单位: University of Washington
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-10-01 至 2014-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1135479&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CI; TEAM; Demo; Collaborative; Games

Collaborative Games for Bioinformatics Education This Demonstration Project will leverage recent research into the socio-emotional mechanics of online collaboration and multi-player game development, and the existing social networking structure of BuddyPress, to create a novel educational game that incorporates bioinformatics and cyberinfrastructure (CI) concepts aimed at middle school and early high school students. Interest in and participation in STEM fields and CI in the US is declining, specifically with regard to underrepresented minorities and women. It has been shown that the loss of interest in STEM fields often occurs as early as middle school, and additionally, that interest in such fields must be generated early for their appeal to continue into the undergraduate level and beyond. Given current K-12 funding constraints, it can be difficult for teachers to spend one-on-one time with students to encourage them to learn about cyber-technology and problem solving. Many educational games have been developed in recent years with a social networking component that have reached audiences of varying sizes. However, few of these have been designed specifically to teach CI concepts. Further, it is not yet clearly understood exactly what makes an educational game compelling, nor what elements must be designed into a social networking game to enable it to spread widely and have a long lifetime. The role of affect or emotion in computing and in game technology is only recently coming to the forefront. Recent studies have demonstrated that people play games because of the way they stimulate their emotions. Researchers have identified key areas of game-induced emotions and specified means to design game mechanics to evoke each of these emotions. This approach is novel not only because it will teach bioinformatics and CI, but because it focuses on eliciting emotions in a multi-player environment. The PIs will utilize these emotions to enhance peer-to-peer learning, and analyze the outcomes of the player experience. This work will be additionally informed by the PI?s previous research into the socio-emotional aspects of online collaboration among children and in CI for scientific collaborations. Further, the research team will leverage the existing social networking structure of BuddyPress (buddypress.org), an open source social networking platform that has been downloaded over 392,000 times, to facilitate game development. By linking collaboration, positive emotions, and social networking to the educational component of the game, the team will show students that cyber problem solving can be fun and engaging. They will expose more young people to CI concepts and generate more interest in STEM careers at a critical age where young people are defining their self-identity. Intellectual Merit. This project will make novel empirical and conceptual contributions to research in educational social networking game development and the educational component of eScience and CI. Empirically this project will provide an understanding of how young people use and adopt collaborative educational games, how they become emotionally involved in the subject matter, and how to design such games to support multiple purposes. Conceptually this project builds on the PI's previous research on architecting scientific CI and researching the emotional dimensions of online collaboration. This will create a framework for understanding how emotions can be leveraged to develop non-traditional means of CI education. Broader Impacts. The game will not only leverage social networking to expose larger numbers of young people to CI and bioinformatics problem solving and directly motivate students to become interested in CI/bioinformatics careers, but it will also inform, support, and stimulate the development of future educational games to support CI learning. By developing a deeper understanding of what makes a game popular, and by the application of this understanding to a social networking CI educational game, this project will provide unique and timely insights into how to engage a broader community of young students in STEM fields. To increase the participation of underrepresented minorities and women in the project, the team is leveraging the services of the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR) to provide outreach specifically to teachers and students in underrepresented groups. The long-term benefits of this research to society include the uptake of concepts of cyber problem solving specifically among young underrepresented minorities and women, and the production of conceptual models that will give better understanding of the larger relationships between people, educational games, and infrastructural computational technologies more generally.

生物信息学教育协作游戏 该示范项目将利用在线协作和多人游戏开发的社会情感机制的最新研究，以及 BuddyPress 现有的社交网络结构，创建一款结合了生物信息学和网络基础设施（CI）的新型教育游戏。 ）针对初中生和高中早期学生的概念。在美国，人们对 STEM 领域和 CI 的兴趣和参与度正在下降，特别是在代表性不足的少数族裔和女性方面。研究表明，人们对 STEM 领域的兴趣往往早在中学时期就已丧失，此外，必须尽早培养对这些领域的兴趣，才能使其吸引力持续到本科及以上水平。鉴于目前 K-12 的资金限制，教师可能很难花一对一的时间与学生一起鼓励他们学习网络技术和解决问题。近年来，许多教育游戏都带有社交网络成分，已经吸引了不同规模的受众。然而，其中很少有专门为教授 CI 概念而设计的。此外，目前还不清楚到底是什么让教育游戏引人注目，也不清楚社交网络游戏必须设计哪些元素才能使其广泛传播并具有较长的生命周期。影响或情感在计算和游戏技术中的作用直到最近才成为人们关注的焦点。最近的研究表明，人们玩游戏是因为他们刺激情绪的方式。研究人员已经确定了游戏引起的情绪的关键领域，并指定了设计游戏机制以唤起每种情绪的方法。这种方法很新颖，不仅因为它可以教授生物信息学和 CI，还因为它专注于在多人环境中引发情感。 PI 将利用这些情绪来加强同伴学习，并分析玩家体验的结果。这项工作还将参考 PI 之前对儿童在线协作和 CI 科学合作的社会情感方面的研究。此外，研究团队将利用BuddyPress（buddypress.org）现有的社交网络结构来促进游戏开发，该平台是一个下载量超过392,000次的开源社交网络平台。通过将协作、积极情绪和社交网络与游戏的教育部分联系起来，该团队将向学生展示解决网络问题可以是有趣且有吸引力的。他们将使更多的年轻人接触 CI 概念，并在年轻人定义自我认同的关键年龄激发他们对 STEM 职业的更多兴趣。智力优点。该项目将为教育社交网络游戏开发以及 eScience 和 CI 的教育组成部分的研究做出新颖的实证和概念贡献。从经验上看，该项目将让人们了解年轻人如何使用和采用协作教育游戏，他们如何在情感上参与到主题中，以及如何设计此类游戏来支持多种目的。从概念上讲，该项目建立在 PI 之前关于构建科学 CI 和研究在线协作的情感维度的研究之上。这将为理解如何利用情感来开发非传统的 CI 教育方式创建一个框架。更广泛的影响。该游戏不仅将利用社交网络让更多的年轻人接触 CI 和生物信息学问题的解决，直接激发学生对 CI/生物信息学职业的兴趣，而且还将为未来教育游戏的发展提供信息、支持和刺激支持 CI 学习。通过更深入地了解游戏受欢迎的原因，并将这种理解应用于社交网络 CI 教育游戏，该项目将为如何让更广泛的年轻学生社区参与 STEM 领域提供独特而及时的见解。为了增加代表性不足的少数族裔和妇女对项目的参与，该团队正在利用西北生物医学研究协会 (NWABR) 的服务，专门为代表性不足的群体的教师和学生提供外展服务。这项研究对社会的长期好处包括特别是在年轻的、代表性不足的少数族裔和女性中接受网络问题解决的概念，以及生成概念模型，以更好地理解人、教育游戏和基础设施之间的更大关系。更普遍的计算技术。