Making educational games that work in the classroom: A new approach for integrating STEM simulations

The development of analytical skills is a central goal of the Next Generation Science Standards and foundational to subject mastery in STEM fields. Yet, significant barriers exist to students gaining such skills. Here we describe a new “gentle-slope” cyberlearning strategy that gradually introduces students to the authoring of scientific simulations via a Web-based modding approach called CyberMOD. Modding involves adding agents with predefined functionality to a simulation world to produce a unique combination whose behavior can then be visualized by running the simulation. This permits low barrier experimentation on the modded simulation, which is hoped to help students gain a deeper understanding of scientific phenomena that is the focus of the activity. Our research questions are: i) does this approach encourage students' interest in computational science and ii) does it enhance their analytical abilities, and iii) does it foster a deeper understanding of the processes modded? Here we take an in-depth look at what was created for the CyberMOD infrastructure and analyze the results of initial in-class studies as to the effectiveness of this strategy. The results support the premise that teachers can easily integrate CyberMOD into their in-class activities, that CyberMOD activities encourage creative student learning, and that the CyberMOD approach facilitates student understanding.