Can Playing Portal Affect Spatial Thinking and Increase Learning in a STEM Area

Portal and Physics 1 Can Playing Portal Affect Spatial Thinking and Increase Learning in a STEM Area? Deanne M. Adams (adams@psych.ucsb.edu) Richard. E. Mayer (mayer@psych.ucsb.edu) Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. Abstract Spatial skills have been associated with learning in STEM areas and some research has shown that playing video games could facilitate the development of spatial skills. This study examines whether playing a game that uses a realistic physics engine and places spatial demands on the players could facilitate learning a subsequent physics lesson. Fifty-eight participants viewed a brief lesson on Newton’s laws of motion after either playing the puzzle game Tetris or the first- person perspective puzzle game Portal, which incorporates aspects of physics such as momentum. The groups did not differ on subsequent tests of learning outcomes involving physics, but the Portal group scored significantly higher on a perspective taking test (d = 0.57). This study shows that playing a commercial game that incorporates Newtonian physics does not prepare students to learn physics but does improve an important spatial cognition skill related to physics. Keywords: video games; physics learning; spatial orientation Objectives The goal of this study is to examine whether playing an off- the-shelf first-person perspective puzzle game based on physics principles (i.e., Portal) can help prepare students to learn physics concepts and improve their spatial skills as measured by the perspective taking task. In the present study, students studied a brief lesson on Newton’s laws of motion after spending an hour playing Portal or the puzzle game Tetris. Examining the effects of playing an off-the shelf computer game can be called cognitive consequences research and constitutes one of three major experimental methodologies for game research (Mayer, 2011). In short, the goal is to determine the cognitive consequences of playing Portal on (a) improving a spatial skill that is related to learning in physics and (b) enabling students to learn physics concepts on a subsequent physics lesson. Learning Physics and Video Games Learning physics can often be difficult because many learners already have misconceptions about how the physical world works. White (1993) argued that one of the problems with physics education is the top-down approach in which abstract formulas are taught first, which students later have trouble applying to every-day phenomenon. Instead White (1993) argued that physics should be taught using an approach in which students are presented with concrete versions of these models in the form of computer simulations. While the real world can be overly complex with multiple forces acting simultaneously, a simulation can control for these factors and allow for students to make predictions, then test them, and to try to explain the results. White (1993) used a group of microworlds called “ThinkerTools” with 6th graders. The curriculum was developed so that the initial microworlds had simple situations (no friction and only one dimension of motion) so that learners could develop intuitive knowledge before dealing with more sophisticated causal relationships. White (1993) found that, compared to high school students who were taught using traditional methods, 6 th graders who received the “ThinkerTools” curriculum performed better on simple force and motion problems, better retained what they learned, and transferred what they learned to new contexts. Similar to White’s (1993) computer simulation, some off- the-shelf video games have been developed to depict realistic movement based on Newtonian physics and provide simplified environments to make game play easier. In a study by Masson, Bub, and Lalonde (2011) participants completed 6 one-hour game training sessions playing the video game Enigmo or the control game Railroad Tycoon 3. During Enigmo the player must alter the trajectories of falling droplets so that the drops land in target receptacles. The authors proposed that the Enigmo group would benefit from game play because the game gives repeated exposure to the movement of falling objects and this may benefit students by priming them to learn from formal physics instruction. The pretest/posttest consisted of a test of knowledge about the motion of objects with 15 items involving objects moving freely through space based on physics. Participants in the Enigmo group increased their ability to produce realistic trajectories but only in terms of the general parabolic shapes of those trajectories. After the posttest, participants then completed a PowerPoint tutorial on physics after which they completed 13 test problems based on the tutorial. Masson et al. (2011) found that students in the Enigmo group did not show a higher improvement after viewing the tutorial compared to the Railroad Tycoon 3 group. Masson et al. (2011) were not able to show that experience playing a game that uses realistic physics motion prepares students to benefit from direct instruction in physics, but video games may benefit science learning through improvements in visuospatial ability. Previous research has shown that playing video games such as first- person shooters (Feng, Spence, & Pratt, 2007), and spatial puzzle games (Okagaki & Frensch,1994; Subrahmanyam &,