07 June 2012

Tree-Thinking Through Touch

A pair of new studies by computer scientists, biologists, and cognitive psychologists at Harvard, Northwestern, Wellesley, and Tufts suggest that collaborative touch-screen games have value beyond just play. Two games, developed with the goal of teaching important evolutionary concepts, were tested on families in a busy museum environment and on pairs of college students. In both cases, the educational games succeeded at making the process of learning difficult material engaging and collaborative. The games take advantage of the multi-touch-screen tabletop, which is essentially a desk-sized tablet computer. In a classroom or a museum, several users can gather around the table and use it simultaneously, either working on independent problems in the same space, or collaborating on a single project.


The table accommodates multiple users and can also interact with physical objects like cards or blocks that are placed onto its surface. The new research moves beyond the novelty of the system, however, and investigates the actual learning outcomes of educational games in both formal and informal settings. The two collaborative games that have been developed for the system, Phylo-Genie and Build-a-Tree, are designed to help people understand phylogeny—specifically, the tree diagrams that evolutionary biologists use to indicate the evolutionary history of related species. Learners new to the discipline sometimes think of evolution as a linear progression, from the simple to the complex, with humans as the end point. Both of the phylogeny games were designed and evaluated in accordance with accepted principles of cognitive psychology and learning sciences.

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