CAREER: Developing Infrastructure for Data-Driven Educational Game Streaming

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates using social media that combine live video streaming with text chat and content repositories as a medium for educational games in mathematics and other fields. Commercial platforms for game streaming such as Twitch engage users in tens of billions of minutes of engagement per month. Visitors don't just watch; many visit the site in order to learn art techniques and coding as well as how to play new games. However, Twitch is not currently designed as a learning platform. This provides a novel opportunity for designing and distributing educational games. The research will create a new toolkit for creating educational game interfaces on Twitch. The toolkit will be used to design interactive learning interfaces for educational games and study which techniques are effective. A human-centered design process will pursue making the toolkit useful to Twitch users, game designers, and other researchers. The research team will work with teachers to addressing their needs for using this novel form of educational gaming in the classroom. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.