Fourteen Thousand Solar Systems and Growing: Results From the Starchitect Online Game at One Year

Abstract:

Starchitect (www.starchitect.net) is an online, end-to-end stellar and planetary evolution game designed to teach players about a variety of astronomy and planetary topics. Supported by NASA and NSF, and developed at the National Center for Interactive Learning at the Space Science Institute, the game uses the "sporadic play" model of games such as Farmville, where players might only take actions a few times a day, but continue playing for months. This framework is a natural fit for teaching about the evolution of stars and planets. Starchitect’s systems evolve at a million years a minute, so that while massive stars will supernova almost immediately, lower mass stars like our sun will live for weeks of game time, possibly evolving life before passing through a red giant stage and ending their lives as white dwarfs.

The game has now been live for over a year, playable both on Facebook and externally, and over 14,000 solar systems have been created by over 11,000 players. Since the game itself is heavily instrumented we now have access to a wealth of data that can be used to examine how people are playing the game and what tasks they are successfully engaging with. Through an embedded quiz game we are even in the position to assess the prior knowledge of our audience and execute pre/post assessments tied to game play. This paper will briefly describe the game and its educational strategies, then summarize some of our current results.