In 2008, Education Arcade was awarded a sub-contract under TERC, Inc., with NSF funding, to develop three multi-player flash games and a series of video tutorials that teaches basic survey-making skills, concepts, and vocabulary to middle school age adolescents. These games and videos are to be part of a larger afterschool curriculum being developed by TERC, Inc., a non-profit organization that specializes in K-12 science and math educational products. KSN seeks to address a lack of focus and quality curriculum materials in the middle school on statistics and data analysis.
In the game Categorize This, players work collaboratively to develop good data categories for a set of items. When playing Prediction Cards, kids assemble a graph using terminology cards to match various hypotheses. Finally, in Superhero Draft, players learn about distributions and graph shapes while following a storyline about assembling various superhero teams. The game design staff used formative evaluation from play tests to iteratively refine the games, which were designed to teach specific math skills and content knowledge.
The ten short (<5 min) video tutorials star actual kids who demonstrate how to use surveying skills to solve real-life problems. These tutorials emphasize the social aspects and real-world relevance of making and using surveys.
The KSN website, which includes curricula, games and videos will be released in Spring 2011 by TERC, Inc.