2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In a Woman’s Voice: An Alternative Gamification of the Oregon Trail

Presented at The Best of Computers in Education Division (COED)

This experiential research project centered around an elective Interactive Fiction course offered jointly by the Computer Science and English programs at during the Spring 2023 semester. The course aimed to explore gender representation issues through the creation of alternate versions of the classic computer game, The Oregon Trail. Specifically, students were assigned the task of developing individual works of fiction featuring a female protagonist and incorporating narrative, dialogue, and differing perspectives based on the documented experiences of women along the Oregon and similar Overland Trails in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Games were implemented using the Inform programming language, characterized by coding statements taking the form of complete sentences. This approach provided a natural language syntax environment, making it inclusive for individuals outside traditional programming disciplines. To assess the course's effectiveness, pre- and post-activity surveys with a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) focus were designed and administered. The subsequent statistical analysis revealed a significant positive impact, with a large effect size demonstrated in raising students' awareness of gender representation issues.

Authors

Dr. John K. Estell http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6419-6821 Ohio Northern University [biography]

An active member of ASEE for over 30 years, Dr. John K. Estell was elected in 2016 as a Fellow of ASEE in recognition of the breadth, richness, and quality of his contributions to the betterment of engineering education. Estell currently serves as chair of ASEE's IT Committee; he previously served on the ASEE Board of Directors as the Vice President of Professional Interest Councils and as the Chair of Professional Interest Council III. He has held multiple ASEE leadership positions within the First-Year Programs (FPD) and Computers in Education (CoED) divisions, and with the Ad Hoc Committee on Interdivisional Cooperation, Interdivisional Town Hall Planning Committee, ASEE Active, and the Commission on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Estell has received multiple ASEE Annual Conference Best Paper awards from the Computers in Education, First-Year Programs, and Design in Engineering Education Divisions. He has also been recognized by ASEE as the recipient of the 2005 Merl K. Miller Award and by the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) with the 2018 ASEE Best Card Award. Estell received the First-Year Programs Division’s Distinguished Service Award in 2019 and the 2022 Computers in Education Division Service Award.

Estell currently serves as an ABET Commissioner and as a subcommittee chair on ABET’s Accreditation Council Training Committee. He was previously a Member-At-Large on the Computing Accreditation Commission Executive Committee and a Program Evaluator for both computer engineering and computer science. Estell is well-known for his significant contributions on streamlining student outcomes assessment processes and has been an invited presenter at the ABET Symposium on multiple occasions. He was named an ABET Fellow in 2021. Estell is also a founding member and current Vice President of The Pledge of the Computing Professional, an organization dedicated to the promotion of ethics in the computing professions.

Estell is Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Ohio Northern University, where he currently teaches first-year programming and user interface design courses, and serves on the college’s Capstone Design Committee. Much of his research involves design education pedagogy, including formative assessment of client-student interactions, modeling sources of engineering design constraints, and applying the entrepreneurial mindset to first-year programming projects through student engagement in educational software development. Estell earned his BS in Computer Science and Engineering degree from The University of Toledo and both his MS and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Lisa Graham Robeson Ohio Northern University
Ye Hong Ohio Northern University
Dr. Stephany Coffman-Wolph Ohio Northern University [biography]

Dr. Stephany Coffman-Wolph is an Assistant Professor at Ohio Northern University in the Department of Electrical, Computer Engineering, and Computer Science (ECCS). Previously, she worked at The University of Texas at Austin and West Virginia University Institute of Technology (WVU Tech). She is actively involved in community outreach with a goal of increasing the number of women in STEM and creating effective methods for introducing young children to CS concepts and topics. Dr. Coffman-Wolph’s research interests include: Artificial Intelligence, Fuzzy Logic, Software Engineering, STEM Education, and Diversity and Inclusion within STEM.

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