Selene Poster Set for APS Convention
Dated Posted: Tue Feb 10 2009
A poster session about a videogame created by the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future will be featured at the Association for Psychological Science annual
convention May 22-25 in San Francisco.
"Metaphor Enhanced Instructional Video Game Causes Conceptual Gains in Lunar Science Knowledge" discusses Selene: A Lunar Construction GaME. The poster's author are Dr. Debbie Denise Reese, senior educational researcher at the Center for Educational Technologies®; Dr. Virginia A. Diehl, professor and chair of psychology
at Western Illinois University; and John H. Lurquin, a graduate assistant at Western Illinois.
The poster discusses the structure mapping theory applied in Selene. After creating a moon as part of the game, undergraduates wrote significantly more targeted concepts related to lunar geology than before playing, supporting this approach to instructional game design, Reese wrote in her abstract for the conference.
Selene was developed to investigate how NASA science can be delivered through educational videogames. The research continues under a grant from the National Science Foundation as the
CyGaMEs project.