Spatial reasoning is an important skillset that is malleable to training interventions. One possible context for intervention is the popular video game Minecraft. Minecraft encourages users to engage in spatial manipulation of 3D objects. However, few papers have chronicled any in-game practices that might evidence spatial reasoning, or how we might study its development through the game. In this paper, we report on 11 middle school students’ spatial reasoning practices while playing Minecraft. We use audio and video data of student gameplay to delineate five in-game practices that align with spatial reasoning. We expand on a student case study, to explicate these practices. The identified practices may be beneficial for studying spatial reasoning development in game-based environments and contribute to a growing body of research on ways games support development of important and transferable skills.
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Spatial AMR: Expanded Spatial Annotation in the Context of a Grounded Minecraft Corpus
This paper presents an expansion to the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotation schema that captures fine-grained semantically and pragmatically derived spatial information in grounded corpora. We describe a new lexical category conceptualization and set of spatial annotation tools built in the context of a multimodal corpus consisting of 185 3D structure-building dialogues between a human architect and human builder in Minecraft. Minecraft provides a particularly beneficial spatial relation-elicitation environment because it automatically tracks locations and orientations of objects and avatars in the space according to an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Through a two-step process of sentence-level and document-level annotation designed to capture implicit information, we leverage these coordinates and bearings in the AMRs in combination with spatial framework annotation to ground the spatial language in the dialogues to absolute space.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1764048
- PAR ID:
- 10179909
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020),
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4883–4892
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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