TICL Awards Reese and Colleagues 2015 Outstanding International Research Collaboration
Date Posted: Thur Mar 5 2015
TICL awarded CyGaMEs principal investigator Debbie Denise Reese, Ph.D., and colleagues Leticia Martín Hernández, Ph.D., and Carlos Álvarez Iglesias, Ph.D., its 2015 Outstanding International Research Collaboration Award. The award recognizes international research collaborators who make substantial scholarly contributions to the intersection of four disciplines: technology, instruction, cognition and learning. The award committee evaluated the quality of the collaborators' scholarly output, excellence of scholarship related to technology, instruction, cognition, and learning (TICL); and the demonstrated impact of the international research collaboration. According to the Awards Committee, the CyGaMEs nominees showcased "international excellence in TICL." Eligibility required each collaborating researcher hold a Ph.D. in domain of specialization.
Since 2013, Álvarez Iglesias has incorporated Selene into his education outreach activities for the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory and Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, where he is an astrophysicist. Álvarez Iglesias notes that Carl Sagan was his inspiration as a child. Álvarez Iglesias aspires for his own outreach events to similarly inspire today's young people to study the sky and science. Selene is central to the opportunities he offers youth in the Canary Islands, Spain.
The international research team's collaboration has produced findings that challenge traditional practice and pedagogy for instructional game design. Players who mindfully engage with Selene gameplay to meet learning goals may experience a perception of striving rather than a balance of skill and challenge identified as "flow" experience. The team also identified a dashboard effect: Players discover and apply new knowledge through the Selenegame, but players may use the dashboard to identify and strive toward knowledge expertise. Reese and her colleagues are seeking additional funding through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health to ascertain if methods applied to instructional games for Earth and space science like Selene transfer to health-related applications of nanoscience and nanotechnologies. The scholars also plan to investigate the characteristics of learning communities (e.g, classrooms and educators) to determine which and how they lead to the extraordinary learner accomplishment achieved by whole classes of the Canary Islands players and, although to a lesser degree, by outstanding educators and their students in the United States.
The international research team's collaboration has produced findings that challenge traditional practice and pedagogy for instructional game design. Players who mindfully engage with Selene gameplay to meet learning goals may experience a perception of striving rather than a balance of skill and challenge identified as "flow" experience. The team also identified a dashboard effect: Players discover and apply new knowledge through the Selene game, but players may use the dashboard to identify and strive toward knowledge expertise.
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