* This document was prepared for “PLAYSPACE: An examination of learning in multicultural, digital play spaces”. This project is sponsored by a CILT seed grant. Further details on the project are available at http://concepts.concord.org/playspace WHAT DO GAME DESIGNERS KNOW ABOUT SCAFFOLDING? BORROWING SIMCITY DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR EDUCATION Nathan Bos, serp@umich.edu Center for Innovative Learning Technologies ABSTRACT What do game designers know about sustaining learner engagement? This paper analyzed the popular simulation game SimCity with the goal of identifying design principles that would be useful for educators. The term ‘organic feedback’ is used to describe how SimCity gradually increases the complexity of its simulations and gives players a constant, pleasing level of new stimulation with taking control away from the user. This model of organic feedback might be useful for designers of modern simulation environments that strive to give learners control of their learning, but also must meet the challenge of communicating complex content. The paper ends by describing how a game such as SimCity could be adapted to fit better into a school environment with new features such as better exporting of raw data, direct access to the simulation engine, and professional development support for teachers. INTRODUCTION A key challenge of using complex simulations for education is helping students move up the difficult learning curve of using these tools. Computer simulations such as Interactive Physics, StarLogo, and Stella have great potential as learning aids, but students must master a daunting set of skills and concepts before they can work effectively with them. Too often, a classroom teacher is forced to use these tools in a shallow or overly-structured way, not because the students cannot master the advanced concepts, but because students lack the motivation and self-direction to become experts with these tools without an unrealistic amount of personal help from the teacher. The result is that wonderful tools often get relegated to marginal roles within the curriculum, or are not used at all. To address this problem, there is current research on methods of ‘scaffolding’ student learning in these environments. Some progress is being made on the cognitive side of this problem. For example, Model-It has been a successful i mplementation of a Stella -like dynamic modeling (Jackson, Stratford, Krajcik & Soloway, 1995), partly through clever interface design, and partly through attention to contextual variables such as curriculum design and teacher professional development. There is now a need for research on scaffolding of engagement to supplement scaffolding of cognition. In order to master complex domains, students must stay engaged and motivated for extended periods of time, but the design features that promote extended engagement are not well understood. While there is a growing set of studies of developing learner understanding, there are few careful, detailed studies of students’ engagement and attention-management processes while learning complex simulations.