Student's Problem Appropriation in an Epidemiology Game

ISBN 978-1-906638-47-4International audienceOne of the most important conditions for effective learning in a game is the appropriation of the problem by students. This study aims to produce results on the conditions under which this appropriation occurs, particularly on the roles of teachers, computer environment and collaboration among students. While students dive in or step out of the game, we investigate empirically how they progress from playing the game to elaborating strategies. Our experiment takes place during biostatistics classes and is based on the laboratorium of epidemiology (Ney and Balacheff 2008), a virtual hospital that immerses learners into a full-scale, persistent and distributed simulation combined with a gaming scenario. This laboratorium was collaboratively designed by researchers, experts and teachers. It is used on one hand by medical students who design and implement an epidemiology study, consequently developing critical thinking on statistics and epidemiology studies and on the other by researchers who assess the conditions of learning with such a simulation