An Exploratory Analysis of Students' Problem-Solving Strategies in the Water Cycle Game

Educational games have demonstrated their benefits across various subjects and skills. To understand how a well-designed game enhances learning, it is crucial to analyze students' choices throughout the learning process. This can be explored using the framework of problem-solving strategies. While studies have explored problem-solving strategies in domains such as math, physics, and biology, limited research has been conduct-ed on similar work in geography. Furthermore, existing studies have mainly focused on summarizing and categorizing strategies as well as correlating them with learning outcomes. How-ever, they have seldom visualized the temporal changes in problem-solving strategies at a more granular time scale to demonstrate the development of problem-solving skills. To fill this gap, the present study aims to investigate how students engage with Water Cycle, a geography game designed to teach the water movement processes to middle school students. Specifically, it seeks to summarize students¿½f problem-solving strategies, visualize the temporal changes in these strategies, and evaluate their effectiveness with regards to winning the game. Students demonstrated an increase in complexity and effective-ness of their problem-solving strategies within a single game, suggesting they acquired knowledge relevant to being successful in the game. These findings complement existing research and underscore the potential of using game learning analytics to study the temporal evolution of problem-solving in educational games.