Grand Text Auto

Members of the Tiltfactor team attended the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in San Francisco and presented research on games designed for our BIAS project!

Geoff introduced our work by discussing the goals of our lab and the theories behind our BIAS research. We then talked about our games Awkward Moment and buffalo and played a few rounds of each game with the audience. The attendees were receptive of our games and eagerly joined in to play! Geoff finished our discussion by presenting data to show that our games can help players think of themselves and others in ways that reduce the effects of implicit bias. The audience seemed particularly interested that we presented evidence of some transformation in players’ thinking – we love evidence-based research, too! We had a wonderful and engaged audience and thank them for attending our session and for their thoughtful questions about our work.

The Presidential Scholars Program at Dartmouth enables juniors to work closely with faculty on research projects. During the 2011-12 school year, I was one of three Presidential Scholars working at Tiltfactor. This past winter and spring, I learned quite a bit about game design and game research while working on a number of projects at the lab. I focused primarily on contributing to NSF-funded BIAS studies on reworking stereotypes and biases and to research involving POX: SAVE THE PEOPLE, although I also assisted with various outreach events and general lab tasks.

What a busy summer at the Tiltfactor Laboratory! As we have been preparing for GenCon and working on our games, we also spent some time at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH hosting a Gamecrafting Workshop for local youth.

We had a wonderful week getting to know our campers and helping them design games! On Monday, campers played games such as Awkward Moment™ and Battleship to learn about games and what makes a game fun. On Tuesday, campers incorporated the game design ideas they learned from Dr. Flanagan and the Tilt staff to create the first prototypes of their games.

Can you learn math skills through moving your token in a board game? Geetha Ramani, a professor at the University of Maryland, and Robert Siegler, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, have published a study that suggests that low-income preschoolers demonstrated more proficiency on mathematical tasks after playing a linear number board game.

The researchers were interested in studying preschoolers’ math skills, specifically how children think about the relationships between numbers. According to prior research by Siegler, preschoolers do not yet have a linear representation of numbers, which is a concept that, once mastered, correlates with a variety of tasks related to superior mathematical performance (Siegler & Booth, 2004).

Have you ever played UNO, Scrabble, Hearts, or Dominoes? Chances are that you have. Classic card and board games are widely popular. According to Mattel, 30,000 games of Scrabble are started each hour. According to Hasbro, more than 275 million games of Monopoly have been sold worldwide. With online, mobile, and handheld versions of classic games available, it is difficult to quantify how popular they are, but also easy to see how ubiquitous they remain.