Little Big Data – a secondary school game raising awareness on data collection and analysis

The science of collecting and analyzing vast amounts of data to make predictions or derive other types of conclusions is often called Big Data. It is expected that a new generation of college students will be studying and working with Big Data. However, at the secondary school level, a serious lack of knowledge about it has often been detected. We designed a serious game to introduce students to this topic. Because Big Data is far too complex to teach in a single game, we focused our game design on two main elements: data collection and data analysis. The game raises awareness on these topics by immersing players in realistic situations, in which they strategically place data collection centers and use the collected data to answer various appealing queries and scenarios. These scenarios exemplify several opportunities and risks of real-world uses of Big Data. From a preliminary evaluation of the game, we conclude that the current game design leads to a statistically significant increase in awareness.