Canaries in the Coalmine – Process Evaluation and Project Summative Assessment Report

The Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE) at TERC embarked on a research project to study serious online collaborative gaming environments as a vehicle for engaging the public with National Science Digital Library (NSDL) resources. The goal of the project was two-fold: to design and test serious games that use a prototype virtual resource center; and to build a community and framework for creating a Serious Games Pathway to deliver NSDL resources into this burgeoning community with the aim of facilitating STEM learning. As part of this endeavor, the external evaluators under the direction of John Fraser (formerly of the Institute for Learning Innovation and now with New Knowledge Organization Ltd.) conducted a process evaluation concurrent with the research project in order to understand the environment and team interactions that impacted the project evolution, to provide feedback to the Principal Investigator (PI) on strategic issues that could imperil the success of the research, and finally to reflect on the final results that flowed from the research effort. Appendix includes interview guides.