August 15th, 2024 - July 31st, 2027 | PROJECT
It is essential to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion by making programs more accessible for individuals with disabilities to broaden the STEM enterprise and create a more inclusive workforce. Despite rising awareness of barriers in STEM for those with disabilities most efforts have centered on physical disabilities, often overlooking neurodiverse learners. To address the issues of neurodiverse learners, this project leverages game development innovations to offer an engaging STEM curriculum tailored for individuals with disabilities through video game design. The focus is on designing a curriculum to support the development of computational thinking skills with middle-school students with disabilities to: (1) embed acquisition of computational concepts and practices within a highly engaging context; (2) complement the increasingly computational nature of STEM careers; and (3) lead to tangible representations of learning. The design, development, implementation, and evaluation of an accessible video game design curriculum using Nintendo's Game Builder Garage platform will be deployed in informal STEM environments to investigate how participation influences computational thinking skills and attitudes towards STEM for individuals with disabilities.
The aims of this project are to influence STEM perceptions and skills for individuals with disabilities in informal STEM learning settings. The target audience are middle school students with disabilities. This Integrating Research and Practice project will be guided by these research questions: 1) How can a curriculum be designed to support development of computational thinking for individuals with disabilities for deployment in informal STEM learning environments? 2) How do stakeholders (e.g., individuals with disabilities, caregivers, experts) perceive the accessibility and ease-of-use of the curriculum and game development tools, and what improvements are needed? 3) What is the influence of the Gaming for Good learning experience on participants' perceptions towards STEM? 4) What is the influence of the Gaming for Good learning experience on participants' computational thinking skills? A mixed methods research design and an iterative learning experience design evaluation approach, which includes formative, summative, and remedial phases, will be employed in this project. As a result, this project will produce a co-designed inclusive digital game-based learning curriculum that addresses the following STEM topics: data, modeling & simulation, computational problem solving, and systems thinking. The broader impact of this project is that by shifting from a programming to a data focus in game making, STEM careers like computer science, game design, and instructional design will be more accessible to individuals with disabilities.
Project Website(s)
(no project website provided)
Team Members
Noah Glaser, Principal Investigator, University of Missouri-ColumbiaAmanda Olsen, Co-Principal Investigator, University of Missouri-Columbia
Matthew Schmidt, Co-Principal Investigator, University of Missouri-Columbia
Lucas Jensen, Co-Principal Investigator, University of Missouri-Columbia
Kieren Mendoza, Co-Principal Investigator, University of Missouri-Columbia
Funders
Funding Source: NSF
Funding Program: Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL)
Award Number: 2415415
Funding Amount: $1,099,362.00
Tags
Access and Inclusion: People with Disabilities
Audience: Educators | Teachers | Learning Researchers | Middle School Children (11-13) | Museum | ISE Professionals
Discipline: Computing and information science | Education and learning science | General STEM | Technology
Resource Type: Project Descriptions | Projects
Environment Type: Games | Simulations | Interactives | Informal | Formal Connections | K-12 Programs | Media and Technology