Epistemic network analysis provides a useful method for measuring the development of meaningful skills and ways of thinking for participants in epistemic games. This study compares the development... Show More

Epistemic network analysis provides a useful method for measuring the development of meaningful skills and ways of thinking for participants in epistemic games. This study compares the development of an epistemic frame in a journalism epistemic game, science.net, a role-playing game modeled on authentic journalism practice in which students take on the role of journalists and interact with fellow students and mentors, with a professional journalism practicum. Analyzing the discourse produced by both the game and the practicum through epistemic network analysis (ENA) shows how the virtual internship produced the same type of mentor feedback as the professional practicum on which it was modeled. Players also were able to learn different aspects of journalistic professional expertise as a result of playing the game, and these learning gains continued to be present months after the game was over. Participants in both the simulation and practicum demonstrated significant increases in journalism performance as measured through ENA. Epistemic games, like science.net, have the potential to reproduce key training practices of professional experiences and develop the components of epistemic frames of particular communities. ENA is a valuable tool for assessing the ability of epistemic games to produce these results.

This article reports an investigation of preservice teachers' interactions with a computer simulation designed to allow them to explore the nature and practices of science. Participants included 188... Show More

This article reports an investigation of preservice teachers' interactions with a computer simulation designed to allow them to explore the nature and practices of science. Participants included 188 preservice, secondary-level, science and mathematics teachers who were enrolled in one of seven consecutive semesters in a professional development course as part of the teacher certification program at a large research university. Artifacts, including articles published in an online journal, responses to focus questions, reflections on the activity, as well as audio and video recordings of the activities themselves, were analyzed following a grounded approach. The simulation activities qualified in many respects as authentic science as identified by . Further, what these activities revealed about student beliefs in regard to the nature and practice of science correlated with their reactions toward the simulation and their views of how it might be used in high school classes.

Dwarf Fortress is a digital game with an unusually detailed and complex underlying simulation based on real world systems. Gameplay is unforgiving and condensed knowledge resources that support... Show More

Dwarf Fortress is a digital game with an unusually detailed and complex underlying simulation based on real world systems. Gameplay is unforgiving and condensed knowledge resources that support effective play are scarce. To learn more about the inner workings of the game and make its challenges more tractable, the community of Dwarf Fortress players engages in systematic, evidence-based, experimental inquiry of the game. The community calls this pursuit “dwarf science”. In this paper, the author investigates the origins, evolution, and practice of “dwarf science”, and frames it as a model of how digital games for science learning might support the epistemic frame of science among learners.

Epistemic frame theory has guided research using epistemic games, which are computer games focused on rich professional enculturation. Among other things, this theory characterizes communities of... Show More

Epistemic frame theory has guided research using epistemic games, which are computer games focused on rich professional enculturation. Among other things, this theory characterizes communities of practice in terms of their epistemologies, which encompass the standards communities use to justify claims or actions. By drawing on contemporary perspectives in the subfield of research focused on epistemic cognition, this piece argues in favor of disambiguating enacted and professed epistemic cognition in epistemic frame theory, as well as attending to more nuances of the contexts of players' actions. These factors affect how we model communities of practice in games, how we assess players' capabilities, and what types of data we might include in our analyses of players' activity. By integrating with the epistemic cognition scholarship, games researchers could enrich their own work, while also leveraging some unique advantages of game-based learning to support broader goals in the scholarly community.