Sasha A. Barab

• Ph.D. in Cognition and Instruction
• Arizona State University

The purpose of this study was to identify motivational elements of an online multi-player educational computer game that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children ages 9-12 in educational tasks. The methodological approach design ethnography, a process that involves using ethnographic methods when the researchers are both observers and d...

Lacking a digital crystal ball, we cannot predict the future of education or the precise instructional role games will have going forward. Yet we can safely say that games will play some role in the future of K-12 and higher education, and members of the games community will have to choose between being passive observers or active, progressive cont...

In this paper, the authors argue that video games offer unique and pervasive opportunities for children to develop social dispositions that are necessary to succeed in the 21st century. To this end, they discuss the design of TavCats-a virtual role-playing game that aimed to engage children (ages 9 to 13) in understanding, acting upon, and coming t...

This study investigates the impact of using 3D immersive game curricula, designed specifically for teacher education, and based in the transformational play theory to inform its impact design. Specifically, we investigated a game-based learning experience called ‘Quest2Teach: The Pursuit of Professionalism,’ in which pre-service teachers enter a vi...

The Doctors Cure learning experience is a 3D immersive game that positions players as protagonists in a virtual world where they must use their understanding of persuasive writing and how to gain evidence from complex texts in their role of investigative reporter. We report on the underlying educational theory, the game itself, and, to justify its...

This volume is the first reader on videogames and learning of its kind. Covering game design, game culture, and games as 21st century pedagogy, it demonstrates the depth and breadth of scholarship on games and learning to date. The chapters represent some of the most influential thinkers, designers, and writers in the emerging field of games and le...

Education is about revealing possibility and exciting passions, empowering learners with the disciplinary expertise to meaningfully act on problematic contexts in which applying disciplinary knowledge is important. Toward this end, we have been using gaming methodologies and technologies to design curricular dramas that position students as active...

Atlantis Remixed is a 3D multi-user education platform that immerses children, ages 9-16, in educational play. Atlantis Remixed is the result of over a decade of research with Quest Atlantis. It synthesizes the theory of transformational play (Barab, Gresalfi, & Ingram-Goble, 2010), lessons learned through years of implementation inside of hundre...

Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which to live. We have reached a challenging junction at which, on the one hand, teachers and schools face increased pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, whereas, on the other hand, they face...

While gaming technologies are typically leveraged for entertainment purposes, our experience and as-piration is to use them to encourage engagement with global, politically-sensitive issues. This chapter focuses on our game design concerning the struggle of Uganda, a design that allows players to expe-rience the atrocities and inhumane conditions a...

In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, Quest Atlantis, to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment gam...

In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, Quest Atlantis, to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment gam...

Education is about revealing possibility and exciting passions, empowering learners with the disciplinary expertise to meaningfully act on problematic contexts in which applying disciplinary knowledge is important. Toward this end, we have been using gaming methodologies and technologies to design curricular dramas that position students as active...

Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors adva...

This article discusses the ways that tasks and classroom cultures can be supported through the design of online immersive games. The authors focus on a mathematics unit in which students become statisticians who must understand the contextual implications of using particular mathematical tools in analyzing different data sets and reflect on what th...

in this study, we investigated children's (ages 10 to 14) stances with respect to the ethics of online identity play through a new experimental methodology. We used a scenario about peer identity misrepresentation embedded in a 3d vir-tual game environment and randomly assigned 265 elemen-tary students (162 female, 103 male) to three conditions tha...

We implemented a five-week family program called Family Quest where parents and children ages 9 to 13 played Quest Atlantis, a multiuser 3D educational computer game, at a local after-school club for 90-minute sessions. We used activity theory as a conceptual and an analytical framework to study the nature of intergenerational play, the collaborati...

Although every era is met with the introduction of powerful technologies for entertainment and learning, videogames represent a new contribution binding the two and bearing the potential to create sustained engagement in a curricular drama where the player's knowledgeable actions shape an unfolding fiction within a designed world. Although traditio...

In this presentation, we will discuss the design history, comparison studies, and scaling research focused on four units we have designed based on our theory of transformational play. The goal is to both discuss the power of these designs, but also the challenges of scaling such innovative learning experiences internationally. These four units (one...

Intelligence, expertise, ability and talent, as these terms have traditionally been used in education and psychology, are socially agreed upon labels that minimize the dynamic, evolving, and contextual nature of individual-environment relations. These hypothesized constructs can instead be described as functional relations distributed across whole...

The purpose of this study is to explore learning/instruction within a technology -rich, collaborative, participatory learning environment by tracking the emergence of shared understanding and products through an examination of student and teacher practices. Our interest was not simply in the interactions among students or between students and teach...

Education is about revealing possibility and exciting passions, empowering learners with the disciplinary expertise to meaningfully act on problematic contexts in which applying disciplinary knowledge is important. Toward this end, we have been using gaming methodologies and technologies to design curricular dramas that position students as active...

Although every era is met with the introduction of powerful technologies for entertainment and learning, video games represent a new contribution binding the two and bearing the potential to create sustained engagement in a curricular drama where the player’s knowledgeable actions shape an unfolding fiction within a designed world. While traditiona...

This study examined the tensions surrounding the implementation of a technology-rich educational innovation called Quest Atlantis (QA) in a local public elementary school. Three qualitative case studies of three classrooms implementing the innovation and a subsequent cross-case analysis were undertaken to illuminate: 1) the reasons why teachers cho...

Drawing on game-design principles and an underlying situated theoretical perspective, we developed and researched a 3D game-based curriculum designed to teach water quality concepts. We compared undergraduate student dyads assigned randomly to four different instructional design conditions where the content had increasingly level of contextualizati...

What does it mean to know, and how do educators best support learning?? These questions have been under debate since Aristotle, and quite likely even before that. At the very core of this debate is a quarrel about the relationship between person and environment, between knowing and meaning, between content and context. In the three worked examples...

The number of games, simulations, and multi-user virtual environments designed to promote learning, engagement with subject matter, or intended to contextualize learning has been steadily increasing over the past decade. While the use of these digital designs in educational settings has begun to show promise for improving learning, motivation, and...

Purpose This paper aims to advance the idea of consequential engagement, positioning it as a necessary complement to the more common practices of supporting procedural or conceptual engagement. More than a theoretical argument, this notion is grounded in examples from the authors' work in enlisting game‐based methodologies and technologies for supp...

This article examines the qualitative findings from a mixed-methods comparison study of the use of an online multi-user virtual environment called Anytown which supplemented face-to-face writing instruction in a fourth grade classroom to determine implications for the design of such environments and the reported impact of this design on students an...

Two major obstacles to using problem-based learning methods with writing in elementary school classrooms are the time it takes to design the learning environment and the time required for students to interact at their own pace with ill-structured problems used to spur student writing. This study examined whether game elements could be used along wi...

In this presentation we overview our theory and design work around conceptual play spaces. Conceptual play is a state of engagement that involves (a) projection into the role of a character who, (b) engaged in a partly fantastical problem context, (c) must apply conceptual understandings to make sense of and, ultimately, transform the context. Addi...

Four research projects used Second Life™, a 3D virtual-world platform, to investigate aspects of technology-enhanced STEM education. These European and USA studies, which differ in their pedagogical-philosophy commitments, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and target content, critically examine a range of cognitive, affective, technical, and s...

We designed a five-week family program where seven parent-child dyads ages 9 to 12 played Quest Atlantis, a multi-user 3D educational computer-game used in middle schools internationally as part of the school curriculum, in an informal setting. Our goal was to understand the challenges, opportunities, and collaborative work that result when both pa...

Three design principles are advanced for multi-user educational videogames. First, they should support situative embodiment in academic knowledge, where personally meaningful activities and coherent narratives foster collective engagement. Second, they should offer multiple levels and forms of meaningful assessment and the opportunity to succeed, f...

This research began with the premise that video game play, especially as it relates to participation in persistent virtual worlds, provides fictional spaces where players engage in cognitive and communicative practices that can be personal-ly transformative in prosocial ways. Players' experiences with these worlds are as much defined by the technic...

In this chapter we provide a framework for designing play spaces to support learning academic content. Reflecting on our four years of design experience around developing conceptual play spaces, we provide guidelines for educators to think through what it would mean to design a game for supporting learning. Conceptual play is a state of engagement...

Two major obstacles to using problem-based learning methods with writing in elementary school classrooms are the time it takes to design the learning environment and the time required for students to interact at their own pace with ill-structured problems used to spur student writing. This study examined whether game elements could be used along wi...

In this manuscript, we describe conceptual play spaces: curricular contexts that leverage what is known about how people learn, the metaphorical power of narratives, and game design principles to establish an educational, entertaining, and personally transformative context for learning. In contrast to a focus on abstracted content and how to most e...

This study describes an example of design-based research in which we make theoretical improvements in our understanding, in part based on empirical work, and use these to revise the curriculum and, simultaneously, our evolving theory of the relations between contexts and disciplinary formalisms. Prior to this study, we completed a first cycle of de...

The question of what students gain by engaging in socioscientific inquiry is addressed in two ways. First, relevant literature is surveyed to build the case that socioscientific issues (SSI) can serve as useful contexts for teaching and learning science content. Studies are reviewed which document student gains in discipline specific content knowle...

The following three chapters describe situations in which gaming environments have been taken into innovative subject areas, and studied through a variety of complex, triangular means. The first offers insight into the Quest Atlantis project and the implementation of multi-participant environments to help teach children social awareness and respons...

Although the work of learning scientists and instructional designers has brought about countless curricula, designs, and theoretical claims, the community has been less active in communicating the explicit and implicit critical social agendas that result (or could result) from their work. It is our belief that the community of learning scientists i...

Although the work of learning scientists and instructional designers has brought about countless curricula, designs, and theoretical claims, the community has been less active in communicating the explicit and implicit critical social agendas that result (or could result) from their work. It is our belief that the community of learning scientists i...

The manuscripts that comprise this special issue are focused on understanding how games and immersive participatory simulations, with their focus on doing science (not receiving science), are becoming an emerging type of curricula for supporting science education. The environments discussed here build on theoretical frameworks positing that ‘‘knowi...

In this forum we discuss a non-reductionist perspective of thinking in science.

In this paper we describe our research using a multiuser virtual environment, Quest Atlantis, to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multiuser virtual environment gamin...

This article describes the development and evaluation of STARstreams, a pilot effort to utilize videos and online discussions in a conflict resolution curriculum that acknowledges the inherent socio-personal aspects of conflict. The STARstreams curricula includes a set of video-based scenarios depicting conflict situations and potential resolutions...

The goal of this article is to advance an ecological theory of knowing, one that prioritizes engaged participation over knowledge acquisition. To this end, the authors begin by describing the environment in terms of affordance networks: functionally bound potentials extended in time that can be acted upon to realize particular goals. Although there...

At a recent conference, a clinical psychologist who works with gifted students engaged the first author in an exciting and challenging conversation. As we discussed specific research and case studies involving gifted children, we realized that we were talking almost exclusively about the importance of context in defining and addressing giftedness....

This article describes the Quest Atlantis (QA) project, a learning and teaching project that employs a multiuser, virtual environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. QA combines strategies used in commercial gaming environments with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users at participating...

The concept of a community of practice (CoP) is prevalent in several venues for teachers' professional development, especially in online environments. However, there are few descriptive accounts that effectively represent a CoP in a manner that will be of use to other designers. In order to illuminate potential difficulties which may arise when att...

Design-based research is a collection of innovative methodological approaches that involve the building of theoretically-inspired designs to systematically generate and test theory in naturalistic settings. Design-based research is especially powerful with respect to supporting and systematically examining innovation. In part, this is due to the fa...

This article describes critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process involving participatory design work aimed at transforming a local context while producing an instructional design that can be used in multiple contexts. Here, we reflect on the opportunities and challenges that emerged as we built local critiques then reified them into a de...

While many of us are concerned with the loss of communal spaces and ties that broaden one's sense of self beyond the 'me' or 'I' and into the 'we' and 'us', less clear are the educational advantages of a community approach in terms of learning curricular content. The chapters in this 2004 volume explore the theoretical, design, learning, and method...

In this article we describe the evolving structure of the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a sociotechnical interaction network (STIN) designed to support a Web-based community of in-service and preservice mathematics and science teachers sharing, improving, and creating inquiry-based pedagogical prac-tices. Specifically, we apply activity theory as a...

The article highlights and problematizes some challenges that are faced in carrying out design-based research. It states that the emerging field of learning sciences is one that is interdisciplinary, drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives and research paradigms so as to build understandings of the nature and conditions of learning, cognition...

A growing number of educators are exploring digital games for engaging students in learning experiences, but relatively little is known about how games engage players, how learning occurs through gameplay, or what interactions occur when complex games are brought into school culture. This case study examines what happens when Civilization III was b...

This paper provides the foundation for an interactive symposium on the design of web-based systems to support teachers' professional development with videos of exemplary teaching practice. Five existing systems are examined against a common framework examining their design in terms of the models of use that they support.

A core challenge facing science educators is how to develop and support the implementation of project-based, technology-rich science curriculum that is consistent with international calls for a “new approach” to science education while at the same time meeting the everyday needs of classroom teachers. In this article, we discuss the challenges of s...

One of the primary challenges facing designers today is how to design curricular innovations that are appealing and useful to teachers and at the same time bring about transformative practices. While we as a learning sciences community are relatively adept at facilitating innovative case examples, we need more empirical work that examines how curri...

In this article we focus on the challenges we have encountered in attempting to support the development of an online community of practice for grade 5-12 mathematics and science teachers. Specifically, this project involves the design and evaluation of an electronic knowledge network, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a web-based professional devel...

this report of our research on a computer-based three-dimensional (3-D) modeling course for learning astronomy, we use the central tenets of activity theory to analyze participation by undergraduate students and instructors, illuminating the instances of activity that characterized course dynamics. Specifically, we focus on the relations of partici...

In this manuscript we describe our “empowerment design” work. Instead of simply building an artifact to help an individual accomplish a particular task, the focus of empowerment design work is to develop socio-technical structures that empower individuals and societies more generally. Essentially, empowerment design is designing with heart. It is a...

This article examines the potential of a learning-as-a-part-of-a-community approach, focusing on the participatory process of learning in a community-based, teacher education program; a Community of Teachers (CoT). CoT is a preparation program for preservice teachers working toward secondary teacher certification in which they join an on-going comm...

A common phenomenon in online discussion groups is the individual who baits and provokes other group members, often with the result of drawing them into fruitless argument and diverting attention from the stated purposes of the group. This study documents a case in which the members of a vulnerable online community—a feminist web-based discussion f...

The Virtual Solar System (VSS) course described in this paper is one of the first attempts to integrate three-dimensional (3D) computer modeling as a central component of an introductory undergraduate astronomy course. Specifically, this study assessed the changes in undergraduate university students' understanding of astronomy concepts as a result...

From the Publisher:Online communities: Understanding them, building them, making them work. A comprehensive guide to online communities-how they develop and how they impact e-commerce, culture, politics, and education Why some online communities thrive—and others fail Contributors include Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation Wh...

In this report of our research on a computer-based three-dimensional (3-D) modeling course for learning astronomy, we use the central tenets of activity theory to analyze participation by undergraduate students and instructors, illuminating the instances of activity that characterized course dynamics. Specifically, we focus on the relations of part...

k, community and domesticity have moved from hierarchically arranged, densely knit, bounded groups to social networks. In networked societies: boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive. People maneuver through multiple communities, n...

This paper provides the foundation for an interactive symposium on the design of web-based systems to support teachers' professional development with videos of exemplary teaching practice. Five existing systems are examined against a common framework examining their design in terms of the models of use that they support.

This study examines the use of electronic networking technologies in the context of a secondary science methods course and an accompanying student teaching experience. Specifically, we examined the effects of social context on the student teaching reflections written by students randomly assigned to one of three different online settings: (a) a pri...

This paper provides the foundation for an interactive symposium on the design of web-based systems to support teachers' professional development with videos of exemplary teaching practice. Five existing systems are examined against a common framework examining their design in terms of the models of use that they support.

Discussion of educational reform in secondary school classrooms focuses on the need for more effective models for professional development. Describes the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), an Internet-based professional development environment designed to support teachers in sharing and evolving their teaching practices. Highlights include a communities...

In this paper we describe the sociotechnical structures of the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), a Web-based professional development tool designed to support a community of inservice and preservice mathematics and science teachers creating, sharing, and improving inquiry-based pedagogical practices, Founded in our previous research and consistent with...

The purpose of this study was to examine how designing three-dimensional (3-D) models of the Solar System supported student development of conceptual understandings of various astronomical phenomena that required a change in frame of reference. In the course described in this study, students worked in teams to design and construct 3-D models of the...

In this manuscript, we describe student use of an on-line modeling tool within an environmental science curriculum that enables students to test the effects of various environmental variables on ground-level ozone levels. This study examines student construction of inscriptions within a pre-service science classroom and their subsequent use of rela...

The purpose of this work is to explore learning and instruction within an experimental, projectbased undergraduate history course designed to support students in engaging in historical inquiry. Specifically, students working in teams collaboratively wrote, revised, evaluated, and reviewed papers and presentations representing the diverse perspectiv...

The Virtual Solar System Course (VSS) described in this paper is one of the first attempts to integrate three-dimensional (3-D) computer modeling as a central component of an introductory undergraduate astronomy course. Specifically, this study considered the impact on undergraduate university students' understanding of astronomy concepts as a resu...