Intergenerational WoW Study

My name is Jason Allaire and I am a professor (and gamer) at NC-State in the department of psychology.  I study cognitive aging (old people) and more recently I have been looking at how video games can improve elders' cognition (see www.gainsthroughgaming.org for more info). Well I ran across Lucas via Twitter and subsequently this site and I have started to put together a grant proposal that I think you guys might find interesting and might want to participate in. 

Basically, the plan is to identify "at risk" kids in early high school and enroll them in an after school program where they play WoW (this is Lucas' Main idea).  These kids would be assigned an older adult mentor to play along with them and our hope would be to improve educational and social outcomes for the kids and cognition in the elderly. 

I have a contact at Activision-Blizzard and she is seeing if there is any interest on their part to sponsor this program.  If not then I plan on submitting it to NSF or NIH.  Looking forward to your thoughts.

Below is a little more about the proposed program/study:

Goal: The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a structured educational program administered within World of Warcraft improves cognitive functioning in children and older adults as well educational outcomes in children.

Participants: 100 at risk high shcool kids enrolled in an afterschool program designed to teach topics such as xx, xx, xx using WoW.  100 adults aged 60 and over, 50 of which are assigned as mentors to the at risk kids.  We need to know how many teachers are on the WoW in schools board and how many would be willing to participate. Also where they are located.

Design: Pretest-intervention-posttest design.  Participants will be assigned to one of two groups -- Intergenerational group or Age-same group.  Children in the intergenerational group will be assigned a elder as a mentor and will play WoW with that mentor. The remaining 50 kids will will play WoW on their own. Fifty of the older adults will be in the intergenerational groups and the remaining 50 older adults will play WoW on their own.

Intervention Protocol: The two intervention groups will all complete a set of cognitive-based game tasks (e.g., quests, find and use a mailbox) selected to exercise specific cognitive abilities.  In addition, both groups will complete educational-based tasks designed to teach specific topics such as xx, xx, xx.  The cognitive activities are already pretty well developed from my other grant. I currently don’t have any educational-based tasks. Also need to figure out how often the class will meet and over how many months.  Also, do we allow any of the participants to play at home on their own time?

Preliminary Hypotheses:

(1) Participants in both experimental groups will show greater pretest to posttest gains in cognition (young and old) and on educational outcomes (young only) than the control group.

(2) The intergenerational group will show greater cognition (young and old) and educational gains relative to the age-same group.

Overview of the Project:

• A 6-month to 10-month project (after school program) that engages at-risk middle school or high school students in an intense, after school, technology-enhanced, gaming and learning environment.
• The project will use the online video game and virtual world, World of Warcraft, as a vehicle for reaching at-risk middle school or high school students.
• The project will address the following over-arching themes:  literacy and writing, mathematics, social interaction, 21st-Century technology skills, Digital Citizenship, Leadership.
• Students targeted should be those with at least some level of interest, preferably with no World of Warcraft experience, who are considered at-risk for dropping out or poor performance in core classes.
• No more than 15 students.
• Ideally, students and district representatives should present the results of the class at appropriate conferences (NCTIES, GLS) and online.