Beats Empire is a turn-based strategy game where players run a music studio and record label in a fictional city, reminiscent of New York. Through savvy analysis of market trends, players sign artists, record songs, attract new followers, and work towards domination of the top charts of music.
Created in collaboration with Teachers College, Columbia University, UW-Madison, and Georgia Tech as part of a three-year NSF funded project, Beats Empire was designed to serve as an interactive, feedback-driven method of measuring computer science learning outcomes, made available to approximately 600 middle school students across New York City.
Beats Empire is used to measure students’ abilities (or provide students with the opportunities to show what they know and can do) to:
Collect and Store Data. Identify appropriate variables (or sets of variables) that can be collected and stored to address an objective. Identify features of these variables that should be collected and stored (e.g. frequency of collection, format for storing the data, metadata associated with variables).
Transform and Visualize Data. Determine which data is most useful to meet a given objective by constructing a query that includes variables relevant to the goal. Identify an appropriate representation for the data that is to be collected given the purpose of the data (for this game choices will be a line graph, bar chart, stacked bar chart or a heat map).
Interpret and Model Data. Find and describe a trend in a chart of visualized data. Make an informed decision or prediction based on data.
Beats Empire is a Cool Tool Award Finalist (2021) for “Best Games for Learning / Simulation Solution” as part of The EdTech Awards from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
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