Thank you for your interest in the Revealing the Invisible project. We hope this video gave you a basic idea of the work we are pursuing in this collaborative effort. We'd be happy to answer any questions that you may have and would love to hear your thoughts on how we can further extend our tools to support your work and the work of others in the field.

Thank you,

The Revealing the Invisible Team

Ibrahim et al., 

Thanks for an enticing look at the possibilities to enhance learning research using eye tracking in game settings. This provides a great opportunity as well to collect data that can analyze dynamic changes as the participants become more adept at the rules for a particular game. Can you say something more about what methods you are using for data driven discovery? Are you using data mining methods, neural nets? I've heard that commercial game companies are manipulating in real-time the rules of games - so can you "experiment" with the games you are using to help tease apart what I imagine are complex responses?

Cheers,

         Lou

Hi Lou,

Thank you for watching our video and for your questions. We share your excitement at the prospect of using this type of data to better understand and eventually adapt learning games to improve student leaning. In terms of data driven discovery, we currently have a number of detectors built based on game behavior. This work was done by the team at EdGE and was based on the hand coding of specific game strategies to establish a ground truth that served as the basis for validating the detectors. We are currently extracting new features from the eye tracking data stream and are working on analyzing those using both top-down and bottom-up approaches. We will be looking for patterns that one can predict will be consistent with an understanding of newton's laws of motion (e.g. anticipatory eye movements) and we will be looking for emergent patterns associated with the currently available behavioral detectors.

The eye tracking record will give us better insight in a player's cognitive processing but is a resource intensive endeavor. Our ultimate goal is to use this rich data to develop new detectors that can be implemented at scale using either pure game behavior or supplementing it with webcam eye data to allow us to adapt the game in realtime. We also have in place the data collection backend and are developing new visualization tools that can be used across different games to allow us to bring this level of multimodal data collection to other learning games.

Best,

Ibrahim

I really love the opportunity you are providing to students who often may struggle with conceptual concepts through gaming mechanisms. What successes have you had so far?

We certainly find that many students who typically struggle in a traditional classroom can find learning through games a good way of developing basic conceptual understanding. This is not the case for all students and a bridging activity is needed to help students translate those concepts into explicit knowledge, but for a segment of students that are typically at risk including some students from low ses backgrounds and some students with disabilities, this can be a very effective approach. As we finish up analysis of our most recently collected data, we hope to find ways to improve our ability to support STEM learning in a broader range of learners.

Very interesting work! How easy might it be to use those visualization tools and the data collection backend with other games or virtual environments for learning? I know many of the emergent features and behaviors you detect will be specific to Impulse but I'd love to try a similar suite of tools with other activities.

Thanks, -Joe

Our goal is to have something in place that others can use for their own work. Currently, we've only implemented this with TERC games but the games are quite varied and we've designed things with an eye to allow them to be used more broadly. Please feel free to get in touch if you have a specific application in mind.

Elizabeth, Ibrahim, and team,

Very interesting!  I'm intrigued.  I'm not sure what to ask, but it seems that there might be opportunities to look at the actions of novice players as compared with experts and that dichotomy might increase learning of participants.