FiF-ReGAME – Evaluation of Research-Enabling Game-Based Education in Danish Lower Secondary Schools

Teaching children science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is important – both for the individual and for the society. At the societal level, STEM skills are crucial for innovation and economic development [1-3], and they are critical for mastering the complex challenges that our world faces [4]. Yet, Denmark will have a deficit of 10,000 STEM graduates by 2025 [5]. The other EU countries will face similar deficits [6]. While the number of jobs that require STEM training is growing, STEM subjects remain less attractive to students than other fields of study. With just 20% of students entering a STEM field in 2015, Denmark is even below the OECD average of 27% [7]. At the individual level, regardless of the final occupation of a student, STEM skills are associated with success in the labor market [8-10]. STEM occupations attract high wages - twice the national average than for non-STEM occupations, for example, in the U.S. [11]. Denmark therefore shares the aim with many nations around the world to increase the number of STEM graduates and to broaden the appeal of STEM subjects among pupils in school [12, 13].
Despite a vast number of educational interventions targeting STEM education, a lack of systematic evaluation hampers evidence-based policy [14, p.8; 15, p.9]. Within a randomized controlled trial (RCT), our interdisciplinary project will further develop and rigorously evaluate a novel form of education that relates concrete and current STEM-related scientific research challenges to the Danish lower secondary school curriculum in math, physics, and chemistry.
There is evidence that compared with traditional science activities, pupils’ investigative competencies are strengthened more effectively through inquiry based learning, i.e., by encouraging pupils to pose questions and problems through active learning strategies [16, 17]. Conventional inquiry-based science education [18] is a bit like a discovery role-playing game: pupils explore a concept by pretending the answers are unknown. The innovation of Research-Enabling Game-Based Education (ReGAME) is to take these ideas further by utilizing gamification and citizen science, the involvement of volunteers in scientific research [19], to allow pupils (and their parents) to explore problems that truly do not have answers yet. Jacob Sherson and his group ScienceAtHome (SAH) at Aarhus University have pioneered the ReGAME concept and developed it through small-scale testing over the past few years [20-27].
The aim of this study is to design, run and evaluate a large-scale intervention based on learning trajectories that combine online resources and physical in-class activities with SAH’s portfolio of citizen science games and educational games (see https://www.scienceathome.org/games/), which were so far played by over 250,000 laypersons around the world.