The reviews are coming in about the new game SPORE, and they are less than inspiring. Along with its restrictive DRM policy and the weak reviews, I am not going to purchase this software for me or my sons. While I did use and write about Creator Creator, my writing about SPORE is not based upon first-hand use.

The review are in….

Chad Sapieha of The Globe and Mail writes: “…dull and repetitive play makes evolving your own species more frustrating than fun.”

Lou Keston of the AP press writes: “No single element of ‘Spore’ is revolutionary in and of itself. Each of the levels feels like a simplified version of a game you’ve played before.”

Matt Peckham, in his blog for PC World, describes it this way: “…the game’s still a few chromosomes short of a genome.”

Seth Schiesel of the New York Times, writes, “Beneath all the eye candy, most of the basic core play dynamics in Spore are unfortunately rather thin.”

Chris Kohler of Wired wrote about the top ten things he learned from playing SPORE. Number one on his list, “Spore is kind of boring.”

And speaking of learning, is this a tool for science education?

While science was theoretically the driving force for SPORE creator Will Wright, the descriptions of SPORE do not indicate this will help people learn science. When the science is discussed it sounds more like misconceptions, rather than accurate understandings, are being fostered.

For example, notice how the science is described in these two reviews:

Thierry Nguyen of 1up.com states, “If you really need a quick one-line summary of what Spore is, I guess I’d describe it as ‘intelligent design via minigames.’”

Matt Peckham describes early parts of SPORE this way: “Consuming bits of matter builds up your DNA, which you can then spend on new parts available inside a simple design tool that pops up whenever you choose to mate.”

The notion of evolution as making choices, as deciding to come out of the water to be a land creature and therefore deciding what appendages to gain, and the thought that the more DNA you eat the more evolved are so wrong that I wonder why Will Wright considers this to be science inspired? Hopefully, the travel in outer space and the ecosystem building are more accurate. But for me, I am in no hurry to find out. 

Image Notes

1. I was in New York City last week, and decided to visit the neighborhood where I was born (lower East Side). I took this picture of the giant SPORE ad then. The text reads “Mitosis Happens.”

2. The image below is from the Activity Object “Natural Selection” from Adaptive Curriculum. 

Resources

Evolution Facts and Misconceptions, Adaptive Curriculum.

Evolution Resources, Kevin Miller

Ever since, and probably before, Robert Yager’s (1983) study that suggested the amount of new vocabulary in science textbooks exceeded the number of vocabulary words for learning a foreign language, many educators have been concerned with the number of terms introduced in science classes and methods to help students learn vocabulary.

Recent reforms of state standards, starting with Project 2061, have hopefully reduced the amount of superficial knowledge we ask students to learn. Nevertheless, the new vocabulary can be daunting. The NCLB focus on math and English, with the consequential neglect of science in the elementary grades has resulted in many students entering the middle grades with deficits in their science vocabulary (Cunningham & Allington, 2007).

The teaching of vocabulary is the job of all teachers (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2002). The understanding of content vocabulary is, after all, an excellent predictor of success in the subject area (Wilcox 2006). While inquiry skills, concept development, and understanding are more important goals, students knowing and using key vocabulary are important outcomes of science education.

I recently discovered a tool to assist in vocabulary acquisition. Andrew Sutherland created Quizlet in 2005 when he was a 15 year-old student studying French vocabulary. From what I can tell, it has become a phenomenal success, with over 200,000 registered users. More than flashcards, Quizlet has activities in the following sections: (a) Familiarize, (b) Learn, (c) Test, (d) Play Scatter, and (e) Play Space Race. The great thing about Quizlet is it is all internet based, so there is no need to download and install software, which can be annoying in some situations and impossible in many schools.

Students can type in their own words and definitions and then learn them through a variety of activities. I also like, however, having access to the great repository of already prepared quizlets. For instance, I just taught a unit on magnetism in my son’s middle school classroom. If I would have discovered Quizlet sooner I might have assigned the quizlet on magnets to review for the test. As a parent, my other son (in third grade) had some vocabulary words to learn from his language arts book in the section “Pepita Talks Twice.” A few different quizlets for these words were already established. My son and I reviewed a few words on my iPhone on the way back from soccer practice.  

While we need to be mindful of reducing the “tyranny of terminology” that sometimes describes science courses, we must also help our students learn the key words. Quizlet is a free tool that can help students learn and use scientific vocabulary.

Resources

Adaptive Curriculum, Magnetic Field of  Magnet.  http://www.adaptivecurriculum.com/us/details/USSXP080401

Cunningham, P. M. & Allington, R. L.  (2007). Classrooms that work: They can all read and write. 4th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Wilcox, J. (2006). Chicago teachers learn to build academic vocabulary. ASCD Education Update 48 (6): 1–2.

Blachowicz, C., and P. Fisher. 2002. Teaching vocabulary in all classrooms. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice- Hall.

Quizlet. http://quizlet.com/

Thelen, J. N. (1984). Improving reading in science.2nd ed. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Yager, R. E. (1983). The Importance of Terminology in Teaching K-12 Science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 20(6), 577-88. 

               “Teaching means creating situations where structure can be discovered.” –Jean Piaget

Many science teachers struggle with the idea of free exploration. Free exploration takes advantage of the natural tendency for children to just mess around with materials, without following any rigid procedures. If you have ever watched a child playing in sand, you have seen free exploration.

I have observed some preservice teachers struggle with a hands-on science lesson because they pass out the materials to the children and then they try to explain what they should do with them. More experienced teachers know that once children start to interact with the materials, they begin to tune the teacher out. A better strategy, therefore, is to explain to the children all that they need to know before passing out the materials.

Free exploration purposely allows students to mess around with the materials. It is a shame that for so many teachers, science experiences are always canned (first do this, and then do this). I have no objections to well articulated experiences that lead to discovery, but students also need opportunities to mess about. Each time they change something and see the result, they are developing ideas and approaches that will deepen their abilities to design and understand experiments.

The virtual world can be a great place to mess around without causing a great mess! The activity object, “Space Objects Interaction Explorer,” presents a great canvas to mess around with. Students are presented with two celestial objects, larger than the other. By changing the size and direction of the arrow, they control their initial velocities. Then they hit the play button and the objects move according to their initial velocities, and their motion is immediately influenced by gravity. Lines are drawn as the planets move so the orbital paths are evident.

Experienced teachers also are aware that challenges can really keep students engaged, such as with GEM’s Bubble-ology, where the teacher walks around and says, “Okay, let’s see who can produce the largest bubble!” or “Wow, great! Now, can you blow a bubble within a bubble?”

In “Space Objects Interaction Explorer,” the first challenge is easy. Make the objects collide. A fiery explosion rewards success, but there is no big bang—of course, contrary to Hollywood misconceptions, sound does not travel in the vacuum of outer space.

The second challenge is to make the smaller object orbit the bigger one. Most children can’t do this at first, but neither can most adults. It is interesting that most adults know what an orbit is, but they can’t at first produce one. It is very different being able to define the term orbit versus being able to explain why an object orbits another. Through trial-and-error learning, both children and adults can get one object to orbit the other—and develop intuitive ideas about orbits.

Inevitably, the first orbit produced by the learner is not a circle but an elliptical orbit. The third challenge is to achieve a circular orbit. When this task is completed it helps students really understand that orbits are an interplay between velocity (moving tangentially to the orbit) and gravitational interaction. Then, when orbits are explained, students have the experiences to understand why they occur.

 The fourth challenge involves three objects and asks that two of the objects orbit the largest one, which I will call the star. In putting this together, students (and adults) usually place one object closer and one farther from the star. And they initially make the farthest one have the bigger initial velocity. When they hit play, the nearest object crashes into the star and the larger object shoots out of the star system. Through trial-and-error learning, students will get it right, and later when they learn that Mercury is the fastest moving planet, it isn’t just an isolated fact to be memorized, but becomes an example of a concept they already know.

The last challenge is, appropriately enough, the most difficult to achieve. Appropriate because the really smart kids that solved the other challenges with great speed are fully engaged as everyone else catches up. The challenge is to make the small object orbit the medium object as the medium object orbits the largest object, or in other words, they are challenged to create a moon that orbits a planet, while the planet orbits the star. Students can, of course, adjust the position and velocity of the objects, as well as their masses. Success with this challenge isn’t easy and it takes a lot of messing about, but it is fun to see the interactions and patterns drawn of the paths followed. And when success arrives, it feels sweet!

References:

Adaptive Curriculum. (accessed August 7, 2008). Space Objects Interaction Explorer. https://www.adaptivecurriculum.com/us/details/USSSM150202

Barber, J. (1987) Bubble-ology (Great Explorations in Math and Science). Berkeley: Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California. http://www.lawrencehallofscience.org/gems/

Hawkins, D. (1965). Messing about in science. Science and Children, 2(5), 5-9.

Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1967). The Child’s Conception of Space. New York: W. W. Norton.

Paul Marshall shared an early version of his doctoral thesis with me that is important for science teachers teaching about moments, torque, and levers. His thesis compared physical and virtual environments for balance beam learning. The balances used are made from strips of wood with a fulcrum in the middle and weights that are hung from nails at fixed distances on either side of the fulcrum.

Marshall’s work is impressive and his writing style is refreshingly communicative without the vague obscurity of many contemporary researchers attempting to sound intellectual. Marshall presents key aspects of the long history, starting with Piaget, of balance beam studies. This is important for his coding scheme of the results. In this way, he goes beyond whether there was a difference in physical versus virtual representations of the balance beam on pretest-posttest content gains. I won’t attempt to describe an entire doctoral dissertation in a blog—but I will point out some salient findings.

In Marshall’s own words, “The main question to be addressed by this study was again whether using physical rather than virtual materials while completing the learning task would produce measurable differences in learning outcomes between the groups.” The subjects were 32 college students who worked in pairs on the physical or virtual tasks. They were given the pretest and then asked to explore the balance beam so they could perform better on the posttest. Students were limited to a maximum time of 30 minutes for the explorations. I consider this a “free exploration” situation rather than the typical “guided-inquiry” approach.

The results are similar to a study I described by Klahr, Triona, and Williams (2007). In both studies, all of the students had higher posttest scores, but there were no differences between the physical and virtual groups. Because all the interactions on the task were videotaped, Marshall was able to look at the type and duration of experiments. The physical group did an average of 28.8 experiments versus 37.2 for the control group, but these differences were not statistically significant. The mean time for physical experiments was 24 seconds versus 28 seconds for the virtual group, again not statistically significant.

Marshall classified the student experiments by how rich they were for providing useful data. There were no differences between the physical and virtual groups on this measure. Marshall also classified the experiments based on the Vary One Thing at A Time (VOTAT) protocol (Tschirgi, 1980). Again, there was no significant differences here either.

“In summary, there is little evidence that using physical materials in the balance beam task has a significant effect on participants’ choice of experiment search strategies. This contradicts predictions that subjects using the physical materials might engage in greater and more fluid collaboration with physical materials.” Once again, although for most teachers the virtual environment would be easier to implement in a classroom, the data suggests no significant differences between physical and virtual groups.

Marshall’s study went on to analyze the conversations between the pairs working on the physical and virtual tasks. There were no statistically significant differences in the amount of dialog that was coded as hypothesis, summary of data, prediction, alternate hypothesis, critique of a hypothesis, agreement with a hypothesis, extension of a hypothesis, justification by several experimental results, plan to test hypothesis, discussions about testability, arguments against a justification, or requests for explanation.

The virtual group, however, did have statistically significant more talk about suggestions of new experiments. This result was expected because when one student controls the mouse, there is more need for conversation about what they should do next.

The physical group had statistically significant more talk about description of results. Marshall suggests that this may have been because in the virtual situation both students could easily see what was happening, but in the physical situation, when both were sitting next to each other, each had slightly different perspectives.

“It must be concluded that using physical materials has little effect on learning about the concept of balance as presented in this study.” Marshall’s study adds to the nascent number of studies suggesting that virtual tasks make equivalent gains to physical tasks. Interesting wrinkles are the increased talk for planning experiments in the virtual environment and increased discussion of results in physical situations. Opportunities to extend all elements of discussions in all situations need to be explored.

References:

Klahr, D., Triona, L.M., & Williams, C. (2007) “Hands on What? The Relative Effectiveness of Physical Versus Virtual Materials in an Engineering Design Project by Middle School Children,” Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 44(1), pp 183-203.

Adaptive Curriculum, describes its core learning segments as “Activity Objects.” This is, as far as I know, a new term that has evolved from other terms including “Learning Objects.” In case you are not familiar with the term Learning Object, I will describe this, touching briefly on its origins, and then explain why I think Activity Objects is a well-chosen term.

What is a Learning Object?

The term Learning Object grew from computer object-oriented programming, a paradigm of creating reusable and cooperating “objects.” As with programming objects, the generally accepted criteria for Learning Objects are that they are digital, cooperating, and reusable. Unfortunately, as so often happens in education, terms are used in so many different ways, they start being less useful.

From a broad perspective, a Learning Object is any instructional resource that can be combined with other resources. This is formally presented as “independent pieces of instruction that may be reused in multiple learning contexts” (Fernandez-Manjon & Sancho, 2002). To many of us, that is too wide a definition as almost anything can be considered a learning object.

Wiley’s (2000) definition—more useful because it is narrower—is as follows: “Any digital resource that can be reused to facilitate learning.” According to Wiley, “Learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions.”

Friesen (2003) describes problems with terminology involving Learning Objects and makes a call for clarity: “Using a term that make sense only in abstruse technical discussions, and that is opaque and confusing to practitioners does not make its potential benefits clear to teachers…. It is simply that innovations must be presented in terms that are meaningful for teaching practice.”

I think teachers need to be able to easily differentiate between online resources that are relatively passive (such as text based web pages) and those that have strong elements of student interactions. I believe that the term Activity Object is a term that will make sense to practitioners and will help differentiate online resources with strong elements of interactivity. There is a big difference between some current science articles versus cool science experiments online.

What is an Activity Object?

An Activity Object, as the name describes, is a learning module that puts the emphasis on active learning rather than just passively reading text or viewing images or movies. It is designed to compliment other instructional approaches.

I propose the following definition of an Activity Object: An Activity Object is an online digital learning module featuring high-quality student interactions that help to achieve narrow learner outcomes.

To be sure, the Activity Objects of Adaptive Curriculum feature engagements, animations, closures, activity sheets, and assessments, but these are supportive of the high-quality interactions. Of course, some may take the definition I propose and say that many online materials are Activity Objects. To me the question resides in whether or not it is a high-quality interaction. If students mainly read text or watch movies, even if they are answering some questions as they go, this just doesn’t rise to the level of being a high-quality interaction and should not be considered an Activity Object. I propose that we use the term Learning Object for those online materials that support learning but that don’t have high-quality interactions, and that the term Activity Object be judiciously used for learning experiences with high-quality interactions. Therefore, the resource with current events in Earth science can be considered to be a Learning Object but the science project, science activity, and interactions would be considered Activity Objects.

References

Fernandez-Manjon, B. and Sancho, P. (2002) Creating Cost-effective Adaptative Educational Hypermedia Based on Markup Technologies and E-Learning Standards. Interactive Educational Multimedia, No. 4, April, 1-11 

Friesen, N. (2003). Three objections to Learning Objects and E-learning Standards

Wiley, D.(2000). The Instructional Use of Learning Objects. Agency for Instructional Technology and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology. Available at Reusability.