Question: Why do you use computer games

Caspar Addyman answered on 22 Mar 2011:

As well as studying how babies think. I also study how primary school children start to reason about the world.So i wrote a few simple computer games to see what they could learn.

This was a better way of testing them than asking them questions or making them do boring tests. Because the experiment was designed as a computer game the children enjoyed playing it and concentrated much harder than if i had just been asking them lots of questions. There were two games that were related to each other.

In one game, children had to drive around an alien planet and grab the aliens that they found. Like this

But some of the aliens were “good” and some where “bad” the children had to work out which were which. Like this..

The good and bad ones could be different each time. For example it might be tall ones that were good and small one that were bad or it might depend on the number of legs.

We were also interested in how the children might decide to put the aliens into families if there were no good and bad ones. So in another part of the game they had to sort the aliens into boxes. Like this

The fact that these experiments were made into a game made it much more fun for the children to take part in and meant that as a scientist i got much better data for my research.

I am currently writing a few more games to test adults.