Vanessa Stevens Colella
Final Project Progress Report for MAS 837
Cooperation Between Humans, Computers and Things

Prof. Hiroshi Ishii
May 22, 1997

Things That Make You Think

Participatory Simulations of Complex Systems

"Confronting the rules gives you a real gritty feel for the real interactions that you just don't get from reading the aggregate descriptions." Joshua Epstein

For MAS 837, Rick Borovoy and I began an exploration of the uses of Thinking Tag technology in participatory simulations. Working with a group of high school students from the Milton Academy, we looked at how distributed computational technology can not only augment human-human interactions but also can help enrich the understanding that stems from those interactions.

Virus Project

We went to the Milton Academy to work with a dozen high school students on a participatory virus simulation. The kids were each given a Thinking Tag. As they interacted with one another their Tags interacted as well. One of the Tags had a "virus" on it that got passed from Tag to Tag. The Tags kept track of how many people each participant had met, whether or not they had the virus, and from whom they got the virus. Each participant tried to meet as many other people as possible without catching the virus.

As the virus spread, kids became increasingly determined to comprehend the dynamics of the virus. Some participants abandoned the game, focusing their attention on discovering the virus' behavior. At the close of the simulation, we led a group discussion in which the kids tried to figure out how the virus had spread. They each contributed their individual experiences and together painted a picture of the whole simulation.

Key Themes

Since this was a pilot study, we were not interested in answering well-formed questions about learning and understanding in these new educational environments. Rather, we focused our attention on identifying the unique features of participatory simulations. For the moment, I have grouped these issues thematically to facilitate further research.

Emotional Engagement

Participating in a dynamic system is extremely compelling and resonates very well with human nature -- after all, we spend much of our lives as active participants in varying situations. Frequently it is in "learning" situations that we are pulled out of our familiar role as participants and asked to sit, watch, and listen. The extent to which kids were involved in the virus simulation is nonetheless quite remarkable.

The Thinking Tags quickly became a part of each kid's persona, and shouts of "You got the virus!" echoed around the room.

Male Speaker:: So has anyone seen the virus yet?
Student 1:: Yeah.; You have a blinking red light.
Student 2:: I do! Oh my God, I do!!
Student 3:: Let's meet, let's meet.; Oh. You've got red lights.; I'm testing, I'm testing!!; [runs to testing station]
Student 3:: Ohh...
Male Speaker:: What happened?
Student 3:: You.. you.. you gave it to me.
Student 4:: Hey. Someone gave it to me.; John, get over here..... get tested.; I think you gave it to me.

As kids became more savvy simulation players, they began to hide their badges in their coats, so as not to attract any unwanted "attention".

Collaborative Scientific Reasoning

Today, collaborative learning is a buzz word in many schools. Teachers assign group projects and kids give group presentations. Unfortunately, group work frequently boils down to one student doing the artwork, while another student writes the paper and a third leads the class presentation. Each child does a chunk of work on the project, but they do little to collaboratively build a larger understanding.

In explicating the virus simulation, each kid offered his or her personal experience to the group. As the individual experiences were shared, a larger, group experience of the system unfolded. Describing the dynamics of the group's experience in the simulation was clearly a more involved task than describing each individual perspective. The group had to weave each kid's experience into a model of the whole system, taking everything, even conflicting experiences and ambiguous information, into account as they constructed their model.

Together, the kids identified assumptions, offered hypotheses, and developed tests for those hypotheses. They pooled their knowledge and from that pool extracted special cases and key meetings. They built up group patterns from individual experiences and then were able to deduce the rules of the simulation by examining those group patterns. In order to fully understand the virus simulation, the kids needed to develop synergies of understanding. Because everyone's input was necessary to create a model of the simulation, the kids moved away from solitary achievement to true collaborative inquiry.

Simulations in the Real World

Bringing the virus simulation to the kids, rather than having them go to a computer to watch a simulation, seems to be a qualitatively different way to understand a complex, dynamic system. Instead of asking kids to extract bits of their life and apply those bits to a computational model, the virus simulation brings a few bits of a model to their world, leaving intact the relationships, the social cues, the understandings that the kids already have.

By, in some sense, inserting the virus simulation in their world, the virus metaphor takes on increased significance, playing off the existing context present in their lives. This changes the level of emotional engagement and the type of reasoning tools employed, as seen above. But participating in the simulation seems to do even more than that -- it facilitates an experience that is not only different in degree but also different in kind. In other words, it is more intense to participate in a virus simulation than it is to see one on screen, and it is also fundamentally different to participate in a virus simulation than it is to see one on screen.

The difference in intensity can be seen not only in the kids' emotional reactions, but in the fluidity of reading data. Five red dots on a small Thinking Tag becomes the virus in a very real way. Kids meet and hide, attack and retreat, and flirt and despair, all while totally immersed in a simulation expressed through very minimal information (five blinking LEDs).

The difference in kind is exhibited by the ramifications of the change in perspective, seen in part in the discussion on scientific reasoning. As the virus simulation becomes a part of their individual worlds, the kids quickly internalize their perspectives on the simulation (and how it might apply to their lives). The understanding they build through this activity is not about either the aggregate experience or their individual experience but about the encapsulation of their own personal understanding within the aggregate.

Value of a Prop

As the virus spread around the room, and each kid either managed to avoid it or succumbed to the infection, the virus was a real part of their lives. The presence of the Thinking Tag (which moments before had been a novel technology and captured much attention) faded as the red and green displays indicated characteristics of each child. "You have the virus!" -- not your Tag has the virus. As was mentioned earlier, this adoption of the Thinking Tag as part of each child's persona was an extremely powerful phenomenon.

When the simulation was over, however, the kids still had the Thinking Tags. During their lengthy discussions about how the virus spread and who was the original carrier, they used the Tags as props to help articulate their ideas. The presence of the Tag seemed to facilitate the kids' ability and willingness to externalize and objectify their assumptions and hypotheses. They had a prop with which they could show an infected or uninfected state, refer to how many people they had met, and show how their situation compared to that of other players. Furthermore, the Tag seemed a useful cue to help them remember what they did and with whom.

In the beginning of the virus simulation the Tag was a necessary artifact in order to pass the virus around the population of kids. During the simulation, it blended into the background, becoming a part of the persona of each child. Finally, it reemerged as a tool to mediate their discovery process. This could be of significant interest in exploring how to enable kids to develop mental models that support higher-order thought about dynamic systems.

Alternative Modes of Representation

Just as the virus simulation opened up new doors for the students as they tried to deduce the behavior of the virus, enabling them to truly utilize scientific heuristics like hypothesizing, making assumptions, testing ideas, and so on, we think that participating in simulations will open doors in the area of data representation. We explored this a bit by having the kids physically line up next to the person they thought gave them the virus and then compare that lineup to that of the actual path of viral transmission. We believe that this merely scratches the surface of new relationships with data -- and consequently new ways to represent that data.

Redesigning the Game

The above description is confined largely to the first activity we undertook with the kids. We actually ended up working with them for a two week period in which one group of kids designed their own badge activity to present to another class and the remaining kids worked on a StarLogo program to explore virus dynamics. While there are benefits from this kind of construction, we feel that the initial discoveries made through the first virus simulation are very powerful and warrant immediate attention.

Next Steps

Modifying the activity to give participants a better opportunity to test their assumptions and their hypotheses.
Running the game with student groups and teacher groups over the summer.
Contacting individuals in the field of health care, epidemiology, and AIDS education to explore the affordances of increasing the complexity (and thus the fidelity) of the simulation.
Exploring the uses of participatory simulations for understanding other dynamic systems.