Learning metaphor through mixed-reality game design and game play

• Authors: Sarah Hatton;David Birchfield;M. Colleen Megowan-Romanowicz
• Venue: Sandbox '08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Video games
• Year: 2008

This paper describes a recent program for game-based learning within a mixed-reality environment, the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab [SMALLab]. In the program, our research team collaborated with a 9th grade Language Arts teacher to design and deliver a new learning game and associated curriculum. Through the process of game-design and game-play, students advance their understanding of metaphor. We outline the theoretical basis upon which design decisions were made, and describe the rationale for choosing Language Arts as the subject area for this program. Three goals structure our research: (1) to advance students' understanding of literary devices with an emphasis on metaphor; (2) to engage otherwise under-performing students through game-based learning that is student-centered, collaborative, and based in reflective practice; and (3) to demonstrate effective game-based learning using a mixed-reality platform in a conventional classroom context. Twenty-four students attending a large suburban high school in the southwest United States participated in this learning experience once a week for seven weeks during the Fall of 2007. Our data indicates that these students attained a more globally coherent model of metaphor in the course of their participation, that they found both the game-design and the game-play process stimulating and rewarding, and that, given the necessary scaffolding, a mixed-reality learning environment can be effectively employed to teach standards-based curriculum in a conventional high school classroom.