HABITAT EXPLORER: Designing Educational Games for Collaborative Learning on Interactive Surfaces

Data science is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of computer science, mathematics, and subject matter expertise with the purpose to gain insights from relatively large sets of data. With elementary school age children as the target audience, we developed an educational collaborative game, Habitat Explorer for the MultiTaction display to introduce users to the core data science cycle components of data collection, exploration, and visualization. Users capture "sea creatures" in a collection jar, sort their collection into a data table, and then are able to create a bar chart visualization using their data. These components are interspersed with questions assessing user comprehension of the simple biological and data science concepts introduced during the game. The main goal of this research is to understand the potential of multi-touch displays to facilitate data science education with future aims to develop more complicated data exploration applications.