Teaching Space Science to Middle School Students using Serious Games in a Post-COVID World
Abstract: SpacEscape is a problem-solving mobile serious game designed to teach space and solar system science to middle school students through interactive problem solving. While our research was intended to be conducted in a formal, classroom setting, the worldwide shutdown due to COVID-19 in March 2020 caused this plan to be no longer viable as schools went online. This provided us with an opportunity to study how effective serious games are in decentralized and unregulated situations. While we found that participation rates decreased significantly from our previous research, those who completed all stages of the study as specified (n = 17) showed a significant increase in pre- and post-test scores (one-tail t-test, df = 30 p = 0.021) as well as pre- and retention test scores (one-tail t-test, df = 32, p = 0.018). While these results seem promising, this represents an initial analysis and warrant further exploration