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.
More information: