Spore

Adolescent Thinking and Online Writing After the Use of Commercial Games in the Classroom

This study examines whether the commercial video game Spore can support adolescent reasoning when integrated into a high school curriculum.

• A single-case ethnographic study of 18 students across 10 sessions in a bilingual Madrid secondary school class (2009/2010) used the commercial game Spore to teach evolutionary theory, so its findings rest on small-scale qualitative evidence.
• Students initially held superficial understandings of theories associated with Darwin, Lamarck, Kimura, and Gould, and classroom discussion alone did little to deepen them.
• An online forum generating 33 contributions prompted more substantive reasoning than oral discussion, with written, forum-based exchange producing more questions, reasoning, and well-developed arguments.