Games and Grades: How Play Affects Academic Performance

Affiliation

University of Maryland Aerospace Game Design Club

Contact Information

AGD President Kathryn Gaverth: , 301-648-1662

AGD Faculty Adviser Dr. Andrew Becnel:

Project Description

The Aerospace Game Design Club at the University of Maryland was formed by aerospace students and gamers to investigate ways to enhance aerospace education through developing and playing relevant games. For our first real project, we reflected on our own experiences as gamers and students, and decided to investigate the relationship between engagement in video games and academic performance.

Tech companies are beginning to use games more and more to research human behavior, uncovering information previously thought relevant only to entertainment. By turning a scholarly and inquisitive eye to this realm of entertainment and play, we can find ways to learn about how people interact with digital technologies as well as how they use those experiences in their life. Playing video games can have easily recognizable benefits, like quickened reaction times or improved hand-eye coordination, but we argue the advantages of engaging in play reach farther. We argue that playing video games can have a measured and constructive impact on students’ academic performance.

For this project we first will survey students in the aerospace department at UMD about the types of games they play, the frequency with which they play, and ask that they self-report information from their transcript. We hope to find some discernible trend in the data relating “edutainment” games to academic performance. We are also expecting to survey different types of students for a wider demographic spread to compare our results to a larger sample size. Much of what we will submit for the presentation will be based on the results of these initial surveys, but we can also supplement our survey data with interviews to compile more data from a few students. We may also consider a video game test or other more interactive form of a survey.

Regardless of what our survey data indicates, we will use it to inform the direction of our group and will include our data and expectations about the future of our group on our poster. We plan to eventually create a digital demonstration combining our data with an aerospace related game or program that demonstrates how our group will use research on gamers and game theory to enhance aerospace education at our school.

To summarize, we will survey a range of students to determine a relationship between playing video games and performing well in school, then use that data to create a poster explaining what we learned and how our group will proceed with our new knowledge. Our Aerospace Game Design Club may just be getting started, but we are certain we can use video games to help more students understand aerospace concepts better. We are eager to present at the In Play Conference this semester and interact with like-minded researchers.