Environmental Detectives: Learning

Learning and Pedagogy
Environmental Detectives is a unique gaming experience that draws on several pedagogical traditions and approaches. In some respects, the "mystery" portion of the exercise, trying to solve the problem of what is causing this contamination owes much to problem-based learning, where students are presented with a problem, a set of tools, and a set of resources to solve the problem, and then are set lose. Several pedagogical models have been developed for problem-based learning, including Barrows, et al. 1999, Savery & Duffy, 1995, Jonassen, 1999, and Nelson, 1999. Problem-based learning has been gaining increased support in both K-12 and higher education for its ability to help learners become more skillful at solving real world problems. There also have been encouraging results showing that students in problem-based learning environments develop more robust understandings of concepts and have better retention than students in traditional learning environments.

Learning through Role-Playing.
Environmental detectives also shares much in common with traditional role playing game exercises. Role playing games have been used across all disciplines, but are most often used in social studies. Researchers in gaming and simulations have also found that the cooperative learning and reflection activities around games are a better predictor of success than the gameplay itself. In other words, how the game is situated within the curriculum, and how teachers find ways of supporting students’ play through debriefing, reflection, discussion, and just-in-time lectures are as integral to the gaming experience as the game itself. The little comparative research that has been done on games in these settings reflects this difficulty, as researchers find great variability in what players learn from educational gaming. One particular problem has been that many students learn to play the game very well, but fail to make adequate connections back to the real-world experiences that are being represented or modeled through the game. Better games map the game mechanics on to real world phenomena fairly closely, so thinking in the context of gameplay maps closely to disciplinary thinking. Good games also use information and interfaces that students might encounter later, so that students develop skills using tools, managing and accessing resources, and thinking with the kinds of information that we would like them to use outside of the gaming context.

Simulations and Models.
Research in simulations and modeling offers another lens for using environmental detectives to support learning. Models and simulations are frequently used in education to allow students to gain more holistic perspectives of how systems interact. Research in simulations and modeling has shown that there are several ways of reinforcing students’ interactions with models to lead to more robust learning exercises. Students can form hypotheses, and use models to test hypotheses. They can change parameters of a model to test their understandings of how systems behave. With Environmental Detectives, we are hope that students will form ideas and debate different interpretations of the simulation game through the challenges of gameplay.

Assessment.
Teachers will be able to assess students’ learning through the final product that they produce – the case that they can make for having identified the cause of the contaminant, make a case for what caused it, and their ability to prevent its further spread. Students will have opportunities for self-assessment, as they develop ideas try them out, and get feedback from peers. The handheld device will also be able to log all of the students’ activities in the environment, which can then be presented as data for the teachers and students to analyze. Imagine a team getting a graphic report of how much time they spent interviewing people versus collecting chemical data, and then comparing this data against other groups. Or, the class might map where different groups went searching for contaminants and devise better strategies for collecting and analyzing data. We believe that one of the most powerful uses of this handheld technology may be to capture students’ actions, location, and interactions, in the world, and then to present graphical visualizations of how students’ performance.