Mary Flanagan

Growing up programming: democratizing the creation of dynamic, interactive media

Young people interact with games, animations, and simulations all of the time. But few of them are able to create interactive media. The obstacle: traditional programming languages are too difficult to learn and understand. This panel brings together a group of researchers, developers, and educators who are aiming to democratize the activity of programming. They are developing a new generation of programming environments that enable children and teens to create their own interactive games, stories, animations, and simulations. Panelists will discuss and critique their programming environments, then set up interactive demonstration stations for focused exploration and small-group discussion. Audience members will also have the opportunity to download the environments onto their own laptops, so that they can experiment in greater depth.

A psychologically “embedded” approach to designing games for prosocial causes

Prosocial games often utilize a direct, explicit approach to engage players with serious real-life scenarios and present information about key societal issues. This approach, however, may limit a game’s persuasive impact and ability to produce beneficial outcomes, particularly when the apparent aims of the game trigger players’ psychological defenses or reduce players’ potential engagement with – and enjoyment of – the game experience. In contrast, the “Embedded Design” approach that we introduce here offers effective, evidence-based strategies for more stealthily or covertly delivering persuasive content in a game in a fashion that circumvents players’ psychological defenses and triggers a more receptive mindset. This paper provides an in-depth exploration of two key Embedded Design strategies: (1) intermixing: combining “on-topic” and “off-topic” game content in order to make the focal message or theme less obvious and more accessible and (2) obfuscating: using game genres or framing devices that direct players’ attention or expectations away from the game’s true aims. To illustrate the implementation and effectiveness of these strategies, we detail the design of two games that utilize a number of these techniques to reduce stereotypes and biases and present the methods and results of a set of empirical studies testing the prosocial impact of these games. In addition, we introduce a number of other Embedded Design strategies that have emerged in our work and discuss the most viable contexts for the use of this design approach.

Updating a Classic: A New Generation of Vignette Experiments Involving Iterative Decision Making:

Although the vignette method is widely used in psychology, it is often implemented without the key feature of iterative decision making that can affect the eventual outcome of the vignettes. This Tutorial provides an explanation of how to use Twine, an interactive narrative platform, to create vignettes with iterative decision making. Twine is an especially useful tool for experiments involving branching narratives, spatial navigation, and resource allocation. We provide code for creating exemplar experiments in social and cognitive psychology, as well as behavioral economics, and explain how to integrate Twine projects with survey-management platforms, such as Qualtrics. After following this Tutorial, researchers will be able to use Twine in their experiments to update the classic vignette method by incorporating iterative decision-making tasks.

The Effect of Gender on Attributions for Women’s Anxiety and Doubt in a Science Narrative

Although the effect of biases and stereotype threat on women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields is well documented, less is known about how men and women attribute an undergraduate woman’s anxieties in a STEM class. We examined how undergraduate men and women perceive a woman facing emotional struggles in a physics class (Study 1, N = 309; Study 2, N = 271) and having her contributions ignored in an environmental science class (Study 3, N = 344) in three studies and an internal meta-analysis. Across the studies and meta-analysis, we found gender differences in reactions to the stories. Men were less likely than women to attribute the student’s anxiety to bias-related factors, such as awareness of stereotypes or instructor treatment, and more likely than women to attribute the anxiety to the student’s lack of preparation. Women were more likely to view the narratives as reflecting real-life experiences of women in STEM. The results indicate a lack of awareness, on the part of undergraduate men, of the difficulties faced by women in STEM classes. Based on the current findings, educators and researchers should consider the role that gender plays in how women’s emotional responses in STEM contexts are interpreted. Additional online materials for this article are available on PWQ’s website at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10.1177/0361684318754528