Videogame Play and STEM: Perceived Influences of a Sandbox Videogame on College Major Choice
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the co-occurring influences be-tween one’s interest in video games and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) through interviewing college freshmen majoring in STEM disciplines who also played video games extensively in high school. Factors such as family background and other affective components are ac-counted for during the 1-on-1 interview process with 11 freshmen university students. A grounded theory approach is taken for data analysis and show themes of motivation for playing sandbox games, fond friendships, choosing challenge over yield, and the connection between Minecraft and STEM ma-jor. The self-perceived influences of sandbox games on freshmen major of choice seem to point that games like Minecraft, if used consciously and with purpose during adolescence, may incline students to choose a STEM major in college.
... In this sense, and back to the relation between video games and metaverses, those new universes are considered sandbox games (Yi & Lane, 2019), since they offer to users a virtual environment, where they can build and shape their own game scenery (Han et al., 2021;Rivero, 2016;Rospigliosi, 2022). ...
Children are considered one of the main user profiles of metaverses, since they get into those digital universes by playing sandbox video games as Fortnite, Minecraft, or Roblox. However, a lack of research focused on the how, why and outcomes of this vulnerable target in metaverses has been noted. This study aims to investigate the behavior of children in the metaverses through their use of video games and the perceptions of their parents, considering them an indirect target. A total of 31 semi-structured interviews were conducted with children aged between six and 12 years old and their parents. Also, a non-participatory observation of five children while they were playing video games in their domestic environments were carried out. Results show that children play sandbox video games to have both online and offline presence, interacting with familiar people and strangers to feel connected to the community. Also, they recognize brands in those universes and the importance of designing avatars. For its part, parents identify some negative outcomes of video games, but their perception is mainly positive, above all in terms of collaboration and participation. A dichotomy between observation findings and parents’ response has been noted, reflecting a need of digital literacy in terms of communication.
This paper explored how re-engagement (a learner’s unprompted and voluntary re-interaction with a learning intervention) may be measured in an open-world, game-based learning environment such as WHIMC, a custom Minecraft world designed to show conditions of altered Earths. Ways to describe/quantify to what extent certain WHIMC elements engender re-engagement among its players were also investigated. Through survey answers that underwent systematic coding, we found that social play, free exploration and interactive learning elements are reported to be the most-liked features of WHIMC and hence, potential triggers for re-engagement. Using the logs of player position, observation making behavior, and Science tools usage, we operationalized these re-engagement triggers and found that the majority of the interactions with them happened outside of the formal testing hours. An average of 8–16 concurrent players were observed during the first 6 nights outside testing hours and 75% of all nights registered concurrent users (social play). About a quarter of the respondents (28.22%) had higher exploration times outside testing hours and had visited more worlds outside testing hours (free exploration). Around a quarter to a half (27.17–54.21%) of the respondents were interacting with the NPCs outside testing hours (NPC interactions). These findings and proposed quantification methods provide inceptive but non-generalizable ways at understanding and describing re-engagement in open-world game-based learning contexts.KeywordsEngagementMinecraftWHIMC
Use this link to cite item: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/110501
In this dissertation, I investigate the extent to which a digital sandbox game that allows for autonomy and peer-to-peer interaction can trigger interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), as well as explore how prior game mastery impacts these changes. The sandbox game, Minecraft, is used as a platform to test whether interest in STEM can be triggered within a digital learning environment for adolescent learners. This study seeks to contribute to our foundational understanding of how interest functions within a digital learning environment.
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