| ASI Exchange 2002 in Vancouver, BC, Canada |
 |
| To stimulate and accelerate connections and opportunities in BC's advanced technology community |
PrimeClimb: Mounting the Mosaic of Collaborative Interactions |
Jonathan Cohen, James Dai, Michael Wu, Troy Wu |
| UBC EGEMS Research |
Click here for our brief work-in-progress report to the exhibit (PDF format). |
|||||||||
About EGEMS |
|||||||||
| EGEMS, Electronic Games for Education
in Mathematics and Science, is an interdisciplinary group from the
University of British Columbia. Directed by
Dr. Maria Klawe,
EGEMS is interested in researching the role of educational computer games in the
classroom environment in supporting and reinforcing mathematical concepts learned
in class. A parallel focus is on the gender issues involved. EGEMS works with a
multitude of people ranging from elementary school teachers, professors, and
industrial companies. |
|||||||||
What is PrimeClimb? |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
| Screenshot of PrimeClimb game |
|||||||||
| PrimeClimb, created by EGEMS, is an educational computer game that
supports introductory classroom teachings of prime factorization for grade six
and seven students. The game is played by two players, and success can be
achieved through collaborative play. Pairs of students climb a treacherous
mountain together with only their hint-giving tool and wits. The climbers
are limited in the distance they may travel because a safety rope constrains
their movement. This mountain is made up of numbers which climbers may climb on.
When a climber climbs onto a number that has a shared common factor with his or her
partner's number, that climber falls. The safety rope helps the fallen climber
recover. This rope acts as a constraint at times and encourages climbers
to work together. The magnifying glass is the hint-giving tool in the game.
It can break down any number and display its factorisation in the PalmPilot. |
|||||||||
Our Current Research |
|||||||||
|
In the classroom, traditional learning involves students communicating to
learn from one another. Shared hint-giving tools facilitate
this in the educational computer environment. Such a tool have been
integrated into PrimeClimb: the magnifying glass.
It is capable of displaying factor breakdowns, which often prove useful in finding
shared common factors between numbers. Several factors that define a "shared"
tool are: resource limitation, visual effect permanence, distributed nature of feedback (do
both players see the result, or just the tool user, or just the partner?), and their effects. |
|||||||||
|
The Magnifying Glass tool presents factorization information visually as a factor tree.
It is limited in number of uses, and the factor tree remains visible so long as the user does not apply
the magnifying glass onto another number (in which the factor breakdown of the new number is
displayed). Only the user of this tool will see its results. |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
| The magnifying glass tool |
|||||||||
| Currently, we are interested in exploring whether or not limiting the number of shared hint-giving tools improves
mathematical and collaborative learning through encouragement of individual accountability
and communication between peers. One way of promoting accountability on the individual level
is to allow both members of the team to use a tool and then place a team limit on the number
of tool usages. For example, we may find that students teach one another through the use of their
shared tools. In order to draw conclusions about patterns of behaviour and learning, we need
to record and document both a student's game inputs and a student's off-screen interactions
while playing PrimeClimb. |
|||||||||
Research Setup |
We are primarily interested in analyzing design factors of hint-giving tools that promote collaboration in educational systems. Toward this end we have conducted a study in a local elementary school with two versions of the game to analyze the pedagogical effects of limiting a valuable shared resource - the number of magnifying glasses given to the players per level. The two versions used are in shown in Table 1. | ||||||||
|
|||||||||
| Table 1: Sample allocation |
|||||||||
Methodology |
|||||||||
| The main contribution of this presentation is in the methodology of
data capture and analysis of our study.
The sessions of the study proceeded as follows: the pairs of
children were first given a pre-questionnaire to access their
mathematic factorization skills and general attitudes toward
collaboration in math and computer games. They then
played PrimeClimb together for 20 minutes and the session
ended with a post-questionnaire that reassessed their math
skills and attitudes. Each play session was computer-logged
and video-recorded. In order to correlate the digital events
in the computer log with social discussion and interactions,
an absolute clock was displayed on the game screen at all
times. Each video captured a player's upper body along
with his or her game screen; thus two tapes were produced
from each session (Figure 2, the image has been blurred to
preserve the subject's identity). Captured audio transcripts have proved successful in correlating digital events to facilitate design analysis in ethnography and math education research. We hope to use our captured video data to correlate the social interactions with the PrimeClimb game events. By plotting both sets of events on the same absolute timeline (which is made easier through the displayed absolute clock on the bottom left corner of Figure 2), correlations between the digital and social worlds can be analyzed. The mixed video data capture the sessions more completely than audio transcripts and will allow us to supplement the social discussion with physical interactions, such as the exchange of glances or gesture encouragement. |
|||||||||
To record the former, game play logs generated by the application can be used. For the latter, we can video tape the playing sessions of a student. This can be done by recording (with the use of two cameras): what is happening on the computer screen, and what physical actions are being performed. Note that these video feeds should ultimately be synchronized to make annotations easier. It is important to recognize that we must overcome some underlying challenges of documenting social interactions. For example, when annotating video, what criteria constitute a "student explanation" or a "hand gesture"? |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
| Synchronizing the game screen with social interations |
|||||||||
Brief Discussion |
|||||||||
| After a brief glance at the collected data, we have seen that
in the version of the game that restricts the number of uses allowed
for the hint-giving tool, the tool played a much larger part in the
discussion between the players in their strategizing to beat the
levels. For example, in this version of the game the players reminded
each other of the presence of the tool and the remaining number of
tool uses much more frequently than the version with much less restrictive
numbers of tool allocation. It is also worth noting that different categories of social interactions of children playing PrimeClimb are becoming increasingly clear. As in past research from mathematics education, the categorization of peer-to-peer discussion in a mathematical context must take place first before analyses of pedagogical values of those categories can be carried out. A few possible emerging patterns of interaction include: a player explaining to the other player why a move is not allowed using mathematical language, a player explaining the reason for an unsuccessful move using mathematical knowledge, and a player carefully strategizing and logically planning a series of moves. An example of the latter is when a player states that she is on a prime number and encourages her partner to move as high as possible (this is an easy strategy but could prove faulty as multiples of prime numbers share common factors). We hope to apply this categorization and consequent analysis of peer-to-peer discussion about math to our computer supported collaborative environment. |
|||||||||
Future and Beyond |
|||||||||
| We have also noted that all the children had very little difficulty grasping the interface to the game - a result of multiple prototype sessions that have shaped the game interface. This means PrimeClimb can act as a stable foundation upon which other research questions about collaboration can be launched. For example, by changing the mountain of numbers to a mountain of different geometric shapes, we can analyze how younger children interact in a collaborative pattern recognition setting. |