This paper presents results from the design and testing of The Quantum Computer Game, a game that allows players to help solve actual scientific challenges in the effort to develop a quantum computer, which is a computer where individual bits can be both 0 and 1 simultaneously - potentially offering more computational power than all conventional computers combined. The main objective of scientific discovery games is to facilitate collaboration between researchers and gamers, but the focus of The Quantum Computer Game, in contrast, is multifaceted. The motivation for developing this type of game concept for science education stems from a critique that the way standardised skills are taught in today's school system leads to students becoming experts at consuming rather than producing knowledge. The primary aim of developing a game-based platform for student research collaboration is to investigate if and how this type of game concept can strengthen authentic experimental practice and the creation of new knowledge in science education as well as what elements play a central role in this. Researchers and game developers from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University and ResearchLab: ICT and Design for Learning at Aalborg University tested the game in three separate high school classes (Class 1, 2, and 3) and used video observations to record the students, aged 17-20, playing the game. Qualitative interviews were conducted with the classes and their teachers after the game sessions and all students filled out surveys with qualitative and quantitative questions. The focus of the various tests was to understand the motivational aspects of students playing this type of game and how students felt about participating in authentic experiments as well as to detect whether the game could offer new types of educational approaches to highly complex subject areas such as quantum physics. The tests in the first two high schools showed that collaboration with researchers and contributing to research in quantum computing were highly motivating factors. In a survey with multiple possible answers conducted after the game session students were asked to state what the most interesting aspect of playing the game was. To this question 69% answered "To participate in real scientific research", 69% answered "To solve physics problems" and 31% "To play games". This is an interesting result as games in education often are viewed as a tool to motivate students to participate in educational activities. Here games become a tool to frame or facilitate processes where the motivation lies in the subject the game covers or in the research context outside the school context. Designing a game that facilitated professional research collaboration while simultaneously serving to introduce high school students to quantum physics at their level proved, however, to be a challenge. When asked whether they had learned about physics from playing the game using a five-point scale ranging from 1 for "not at all" to 5 for "a lot", 8% of the students in Class 2 answered 1; 46% answered 2; 23% answered 3; 23% wrote 4 and no one checked 5. The third round of testing in Class 3 incorporated a didactic design developed to integrate the game into a laboratory classroom setting that involved simulations, theoretical work and physical experiments to strengthen student expertise in these areas. When asked whether they had learned about physics, 14% answered 1 ("not at all") and 7% answered 2, while 36%, 14% and 29% answered 3, 4 and 5 ("a lot"), respectively. The results presented in this paper show that scientific discovery games and the fact that they make participating in authentic scientific experiments possible is highly motivating for students. The findings also show, however, that the learning design in the class setting must be considered in order to improve the students' experience of learning and that various design challenges remain to be developed even further.
