The focus of this project was the development of an astronomy education game for Facebook, with the intent of reaching new audiences by moving beyond traditional venues such as science centers.  There were two broad goals of the program:  to increase the public’s understanding of various astronomy fundamentals, including the formation and evolution of stars, planets and life; and to explore the educational potential of casual, “sporadic play” gaming inside social networks.

“Sporadic play” games involve little play time in a given session, but require the player to return day after day to advance (Farmville, for example).  This is a quite different approach from a typical learning game which might only be played through a single time, and the extended play period could be a more flexible model for many learners.  In addition, the idea that a player might continually return to the game is consistent with “learning cycle” models that suggest individuals learn better when they revisit content.   Finally, the “sporadic play” model is an excellent fit for teaching about the evolution of stars and planets: with a time scale of one million years to one minute of elapsed “real” time, players can explore the entire history of a solar system like ours in roughly a week.

The game that was ultimately developed was named Starchitect, and is playable on Facebook and through an external web site (www.starchitect.net). By the completion of the program over 30,000 had played the game.  To evaluate the project we used a combination of data collected by the game itself (including an embedded quiz that included questions from a national survey on science knowledge), and a series of surveys and phone interviews of players.  Our research and evaluation focused on three questions:  whether the population who chose to play the game differed significantly from the general population, whether they were already interested and engaged in science, and of course, whether they learned from the game.

Here is a brief summary of some of our results.

• We found that Starchitect players were generally both better informed about, and more interested in, science than the general public. This may seem unsurprising, but understanding your audience is important for any education program. Projects such as this may choose to focus on addressing science misconceptions that are widespread in the general public, but not widespread within the audience they attract.  In effect you risk “preaching to the choir”.
• One reason for distributing the game through Facebook was to try to reach a broad spectrum of the public, and indeed Starchitect attracted a wide range of players. Half our players were over 25 years old, and twenty percent over 40.  A quarter of the players are female. 
• Not everybody came back.  Only about a quarter of those who tried Starchitect returned for a second day, which is not uncommon for this type of game.  However, of those that come back at least once, half come back at least a third day; and 20% at least 10 days.  Around 15% of the players played long enough to place a planet in a “habitable zone” of a star, a significant achievement with respect to the learning goals of the game.
• Players learned.  Both our embedded quizzes and phone interviews confirmed that players improved their astronomy knowledge -- despite the fact that we attracted players who were more likely to appreciate science in the first place.  However, we did sometimes encounter a “ceiling effect”, where an astronomy misconception shared by a significant fraction of th...

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