Category: STEM

Focused on improving literacy skills, the SMU Enigma literacy game is a mobile application that helps learners improve their reading skills  when played an average of 60 minutes per week over eight weeks. The customized version of the game was developed by SMU researcher, Dr. Anthony Cuevas, with player options for middle and elementary school students.

It was piloted at the Dr. Elba and Domingo Garcia West Dallas STEM School and was initially piloted with middle school students in an afterschool program during Fall 2023.  The Enigma research resulted in positive feedback from students and increases in some literacy measures.

At the request of the school, the Enigma project was extended to Spring 2024 to pilot the game with elementary students in first and second grade. The request came from some of the elementary teachers involved in the middle school pilot who believed the game could help elementary students build their foundational literacy skills. Students play Enigma for 30-45 minutes twice per week after school as part of a structured afterschool program. They play the game as an adventurer traveling around the world experiencing new cultures and history while uncovering the secrets of the lost city of Atlantis.

Players begin by discovering a tablet in their attic with clues of a great mystery and travel to the country of Egypt. They move through five levels of gameplay by completing literacy games focusing on different foundational reading skills including: letter-sound fluency; word identification fluency; and phonological decoding fluency using onset-rime. To support Spanish-speaking multilingual learners, a read-aloud dictionary is available. The skills and content in each level are reinforced through games that mimic real world tasks, such as reading documents, labels, street signs, or lists of objects. Students find artifacts and relics to decode the ancient language of Atlantis into English.

According to Cuevas, “The game maintains interest over time because it includes an interactive and engaging story that is fun and includes activities that are grounded in learning science and evidence-based literacy instruction. The students are able to improve their reading skills which provides a sense of accomplishment.”

Cuevas’ research is supported by the U.S. Department of Education. SMU continues to develop the Enigma game with financial support from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation and Barbara Bush Foundation. Dr. Diane Gifford and Dr. Corey Clark are Co-Investigators on the research project.

Middle school math students struggling to catch up with their peers benefited significantly from tutoring via virtual reality according to new research by SMU math education pioneer Candace Walkington. The first researcher to develop and analyze VR tutoring, Walkington found the strategy offered students the benefits of face-to-face tutoring in addition to virtual immersion into the world of math.

Walkington, professor of teaching and learning at SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development, presented her research recently at the American Educational Research Association meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

To conduct the study, Walkington and her team recruited 38 seventh- and eighth-graders from after-school programs at two Dallas urban schools. Ten miles away on the SMU campus, SMU undergraduate student tutors met their students remotely as avatars in a virtual math classroom where student avatars could stretch, condense, and even crawl inside the prisms, pyramids and other geometric shapes they were studying.

“VR is this very immersive environment where things happen that can’t happen in the real world,” Walkington says. “You can have a cube floating in the air in front of you and there’s no gravity to make it fall to the ground.”

Students are drawn to the playful aspects of VR tutoring, Walkington says, but research shows they also benefit from embodied learning, or the movement the technology enables that illustrates mathematical concepts, she says.

“When we move we do mathematics,” she says. “Students intuitively understand math in a spatial and embodied way. They will spontaneously use gestures and movements to explore concepts.”

It’s important to note that the study also exposed some limitations to VR tutoring. Despite upgrades to school Internet connections, students and remote tutors regularly experienced connection problems while working in the virtual world.  It also took time for students to learn to use the VR headset and goggles, creating delays.

According to a recent study conducted by Harvard and Stanford, students in the U.S. have made up about a third of COVID math learning loss, but the $122 million federal aid education package to support tutoring and summer school for those with COVID learning loss expires in September 2024.

“As technology continues to advance, we believe VR tutoring will become commonplace, given its strengths of embodied learning, dynamic interaction and collaboration,” she says.

Walkington’s research was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Co-authors of her paper include Max Sherard, Prajakt Pande, LeaAnne Daughrity and Anthony Cuevas.

 

 

 

Students from throughout the Dallas area enjoyed exploring the lives of animals through the lens of mathematics. Mathfinder Camp was free to participants thanks to generous funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The Thanksgiving week camp was a joint effort between SMU Simmons, talkSTEM, and the Dallas Zoo.

More than 60 children aged 8-12 attended the educational camp where they got the chance to explore an exciting new math app currently in development. The Mathfinder app, a collaborative effort between SMU Simmons and talkSTEM, is designed to make math fun while sparking curiosity and creativity and instilling a lifelong love for learning in children. The mobile app uses Augmented Reality (AR) technology for use on iPads. Students used the app to watch videos that showed them how to see math in the animals and habitats at the zoo. The AR feature allowed them to insert holograms over their camera feed to see new things in the zoo surroundings.

SMU’s Candace Walkington, Ph.D.is grateful for the collaborative effort in working for the common goal of fostering a love for math and science among children. She also appreciates the data gathered to help further the success of the app. ”It was amazing to see the kids at the zoo using their ‘math lens’ to look at the zoo exhibits and generate their own observations and questions. The kids also loved sharing their mathematical discoveries with each other, their instructors, and even their parents at home.”

Koshi Dhingra, founder of talkSTEM, said, “We were thrilled to partner with SMU and the Dallas Zoo that allowed us to bring this unique educational opportunity to young minds in our community. We believe the camp showed children that math is not only essential but also a fascinating lens through which they can view all the places they go, including the zoo!”

Simmons Dean Stephanie Knight is extremely pleased with all aspects of the Mathfinder camp. “There is nothing better than when our Simmons research is taken into the community to directly serve youngsters by heightening their interest and understanding of math, reading and technology. The fact that it is a collaborative effort with talkSTEM, and the Dallas Zoo makes it even more exceptional. I applaud Dr. Walkington and her team for this excellent work and look forward to the impact the app will have when completed.”

The Mathfinder team plans to run additional camps in the Spring and Summer of 2024. The Girl Scouts of North Texas will participate in that camp at the Dallas Arboretum. The team’s current set of studies is looking at the impact that AR tools in the Mathfinder app have on learning. The long-term goal is to create an app that could be used anywhere to ask and answer mathematical questions about the world around you.