Backyard Engineers by Filament Games: Case Study Results

In Backyard Engineers players design a catapult to launch water balloons at neighbors who have been bullying them. Each part costs design points and uses energy when it is moved, armed or fired, so players score by clearing a level with the fewest balloons while keeping the most energy. They adjust parts such as gear ratios, arm lengths and building materials and watch how movement, accuracy, range and damage change.

Lead designer Matt Haselton wanted to remove two classroom obstacles. Building physical catapults needs materials such as craft sticks and twine, plus time and money. Engineering also leans on math and statistics, so the interface is mostly visual and players test a change at once without working through numbers first. The design aims to let students master the engineering process first and add the math and science afterwards. The game ships with a standards-based curriculum and a progress dashboard for teachers.

Michele Huppert, a seventh-grade STREAM teacher at Spring Valley Middle School in Wisconsin, used the game in an interdisciplinary unit tied to the Next Generation Science Standards. The 63 students took pre- and post-tests built in Google Forms and played on designated lab days. The concepts covered catapult criteria and constraints, structural design, forces, velocity and acceleration, and work and energy. The unit paired digital play with physical activities and ended with reflective writing.

Filament reported an average gain of 20.09 percent in general student scores between pre-test and post-test, 9.56 percent for students with identified special needs, and 17.42 percent across all students. These are the study's own labels and figures from a single classroom, not a controlled trial. Games for Change announced the case study as part of the second G4C Industry Circle session, a Google Hangout on September 17 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

Filament Games' website loads and describes the company as an educational game developer in Madison, Wisconsin. Its portfolio page cites more than 400 educational games over two decades. The case study page and the unit page for Backyard Engineers that Filament published in 2015 no longer load, and the portfolio page text does not name Backyard Engineers.

That leaves the game's present availability unconfirmed. A reader who wants to use it in a classroom should ask Filament Games directly.