SBIR Phase I: A Group Video Game Challenge for Integrated Applied Science Learning

This SBIR Phase I project will address the need to retain more diverse students' science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) interest and increase their scientific literacy and 21st century skills. These goals are critical for the United States to remain competitive in the global workforce and reinforce goals of individual prosperity that are enhanced by developing STEM skills. There is therefore a strong market need among educators and parents alike for STEM video games that support development of these skills. This project will create an expert-level group challenge in an online video game for multidisciplinary integrated science learning that will increase students' scientific problem solving and collaboration skills. This innovation will empower teachers to do hands-on, integrated STEM cooperative group learning with highly engaging authentic experiences based on well-researched pedagogical best practices such as cooperative learning and inquiry-based science practices. Key innovations include novel instructional design for live simulated group challenges and generating a scalable architecture that will serve as a framework for creating authoring tools and additional challenges in the future. This work upholds the National Science Foundation's missions to strengthen the United States' workforce competitiveness. This project will establish the technical and commercial feasibility of the collaborative live simulation challenges for groups of students. Key technical risks include creating effective group simulations with randomly seeded variables that run live within a 3D Gameworld, given the limitations of consumer and institutional technology, and developing a scalable architecture which will allow applications of this innovation in additional contexts. The innovation in these areas will lead to future applications of this technology to create content authoring tools which enable scalable group challenge content development to expand to additional STEM content areas across elementary to high school age groups, and can be extended to support teachers making custom challenges based on local interests on demand without technical skills. By the end of Phase I, the project will lead to (1) producing a playable challenge based on integrated disciplinary core ideas in middle school level life science, aligned with Next Generation Science Standards; (2) answering key technical questions around bandwidth and simulation technical limitations for the proposed solution with accessible technology in our target applications; (3) addressing key technical risks around the deployability of the project; (4) collecting initial data on the educational application benefits.