MRO-W Reports 2008-2009

Computer gaming has been shown to increase the interest and motivation in students. Todays students, the digital natives, are poised to take advantage of educational games. The National Summit of Educational encouraged schools of education to work with the learning games community to develop new and revamp old pedagogy to take advantage of these new educational tools.
Although the United States is embracing the educational games strategy further research is showing a large deficit in games geared towards girls. This trend is seen not only in the commercial gaming entertainment arena but also the educational gaming genre. As AAUW (American Association of University Women) Commission on Technology, Gender, and Teacher Education co-chair Sherry Turkle writes, the computer culture has become linked to a characteristically masculine worldview, such that women too often feel they need to choose between the cultural associations of femininity and those of computers Statistics on girls participation in the culture of computing are of increasing concern, from the point of view of education, economics, and culture.
Girls seem to prefer strategy games, clue games etc. Girls also prefer colors and patterns that are bright and playful, where as boys prefer dark and morbid colors. Girls also shy away from violence, where as boys like to win in a violent scene. There is therefore a need to develop games that are girl friendly and get them excited to play games and benefit from the myriad advantages offered by games as suggested by researchers such as Prensky (2006), Oblinger (2004, 2006) and others.
In this project we plan to develop a serious game (educational game) that focuses on skills which a student must acquire to pass a high school economics course. This topic was chosen as a result of the dismal results research is showing. An example of such research is a recent study initiated by Federal Chairman Ben Bernanke (5), revealing the following results:

• On average, high school seniors answered correctly only 48% of questions about personal finance and economics falling from 52% last year.
  
• Nearly 53% said they would have no liability if their credit card was stolen and a thief ran up to $1000.00 worth of debt (the normal liability limit is $50.00 upon notification to card issuer). Only 13% knew that responsibility may be limited.