CU nets grant for video-game research

BOULDER - Researchers at the University of Colorado have received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue video-game design research.

CU-Boulder researchers are tracking how video-game design engages students in computational thinking and STEM simulation design.

STEM simulations are computer programs that model natural and social phenomena, such as how a forest fire spreads from tree to tree. Students design these simulations to learn science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM.

The new NSF-funded Computational Thinking for Teaching Computing grant to computer science professor Alexander Repenning and co-investigators Kris Gutierrez and David Webb from the School of Education, will build on previous work the team did on video-game design as a motivational tool for computer science education. 

That project, called iDREAMS, involved more than 100 teachers and more than 8,000 students producing more than 10,000 games and STEM simulations.

The project started in Colorado but quickly expanded to Alaska, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming where it gave teachers the tools and support needed to take the video game design curriculum into their classrooms.

Participation far exceeded initial projections for the iDREAMS research project of about 40 teachers and 1,200 students over three years.

The curriculum, as taught through the Scalable Game Design Summer Institute on the CU-Boulder campus during the past three summers, was found to be highly effective across a wide spectrum of communities, including technology hubs, urban/inner city, rural and remote Native American communities.