Serious Game Facilitates Conceptual Change About Molecular Emergence Through Productive Negativity (RCT) (original) (raw)

2016

Abstract

Throughout their undergraduate careers, biology students struggle to reconcile how randomness at the molecular level governs cellular systems, often misconceiving these emergent systems as mechanistic in nature. A serious game has potential to facilitate conceptual change by enabling instances of productive negativity—a player may attempt a challenge and fail under their current misconception, and then must reevaluate their understanding in order to succeed. We designed a serious game, MolWorlds, under this premise and tested its efficiency against an interactive simulation that used the same graphics and simulation system as the game but lacked gaming elements such as score, sequential levelling structure, resource management, and a 3-person character immersed in the environment. We tested first-, second-, and third-year biology students’ misconceptions at the beginning and end of the semester (n=526), a subset of whom played either the game (n=20) or control (n=20) for 30 minutes ...

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