INTERACTIVE SCENARIO-BASED SERIOUS GAMES FOR SCIENCE LEARNING IN MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOMS

Middle and high school students in the 21st century are using ever more powerful cyberspace and interactive digital media in their everyday lives. This includes such activities as communicating with friends, locating information on things that interests them, and interacting with an ever growing circle of "friends" through social networking media. This is a picture of students who are creative, motivated and collaborative. However, what students do outside of school typically stands in stark contrast to what happens in the classroom, including science classrooms, which often involves: teachers introducing a concept verbally, typically through lecture, and then using a "cookbook" activity to illustrate and "verify" the concepts they just presented, and finishing with end-of-chapter questions in which students practice using the new concept. In these teacher-directed textbook and lecture-based science classrooms, students often appear passive, unmotivated and disengaged (Osborne, Simon & Collins, 2003). They tend to learn by memorizing the various concepts, terms, and facts (Gobert, Pallant, & Daniels, 2010) rather than through engaging in content-integrated scientific practices as called for in the Next Generation Science Standards [NGSS] (NRC, 2013) and the new national framework for K-12 science education (NRC, 2012). This paper reports on the preliminary results of a National Science Foundation supported grant project on Water Awareness Research and Education-Research Experience for Teachers (WARE-RET at the University of South Florida. WARE-NET is a three-year, immersive opportunity for middle and high school teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools, as well as pre-service teachers from the College of Education, to participate in structured research, training, and professional development in the STEM fields. As part of the project, inservice and preservice teachers also collaborated with graduate students in engineering and instructional technology to develop innovative e-learning modules that bring the cutting-edge research experience to the middle and high school classrooms. In Fall 2013 and Spring 2014, eight scenario-based interactive inquiry-based serious games were developed by graduate students in an instructional technology class in collaboration with the pre-service, inservice teachers, and engineering graduate students and faculty. The iterative module development process as well as the preliminary implementation results will be presented in this paper.