During his time at Worcester Polytechnic Institute Owen created an in-depth thesis. The goal of his thesis was two fold. The first, was to create a game that sparks interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) among female middle school students. The second goal was to identify which characteristics of games improve learning transfer (one’s ability to transfer what they learn within a game to the real world).

The rationale for these goals was that research shows that there is no difference between male and female performance in the STEM fields yet, like the games industry, there is a massive gender gap in professional STEM industry. Through a variety of social pressures, existing stereotypes, and antiquated attitudes,  females are placed in an environment where they are guided away from these fields at an early age.  Middle school has been shown to be the key formative years where female students will lose interest in STEM and move on to other areas deemed more “appropriate” for females. That is why the goal of this game is to target female middle school students and get them excited about mathematics. This way, they will become interested in the field and carry that interest with them into high school and college.

The second goal of this thesis was to identify how to maximize a student’s knowledge transfer from game world to real world. An educational game is useless if the knowledge cannot be taken outside of it. This thesis compares the effectiveness of structured educational gameplay and unstructured, passive learning gameplay to see which is more effective.

The game, called Parallel Hearts,  is a comic book style puzzle platformer designed to teach about angles (i.e. acute, obtuse, congruence, supplementary, complimentary, etc.). With a strong narrative and an identifiable main character, this game is meant to be something players enjoy playing. This is not a dull, drill based, route memory game. It is a game first and foremost, meant to get females excited about STEM.

Read the complete thesis here: http://gamesthatdomore.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Leach_ParallelHeartsMathematicsGame.pdf