STUDENT PEN NAMES: Dancer183 and Dancer135
ASPIRE MENTORS: Matt Gilbert
OBSERVATIONS/DESCRIPTION: We all know that when we exercise our heart rates and pulse rates go up and not down. So we were wondering if the same thing happens if you play video games. We let people play Minecraft Creative and Survival. Creative being used as a calm relaxing game, and Survival being a stressful game. We wanted to know if heart rates went down in Creative as it is relaxing and if in Survival it goes up as it is stressful. We used a Mio Fuse pulse tracker to reord all of our data.
QUESTION: Will a stressful game cause students heart rates to go up more than a calm relaxing game? Will Minecraft Survival cause students heart rates to go up more than Minecraft Creative?
HYPOTHESIS: We think that the Minecraft Survival mode will cause students heart rates to go up, because its more work to survive, and they might stress over dying and losing all their materials. Minecraft Creative does not have the same demands so will not cause stress and will not cause an increase in heart rate.

Figure 2. Minecraft Steve Character. In Survival Mode subjects had to keep away from creatures like Creepers, while trying to build as many weapons for protection as possible in fifteen minutes.
MATERIALS:-Two IPad 4’s
-Homemade Questionnaire
-Test Subjects
– 2 Mio Fuse Watches
-Heart Rate Monitor
-Two journals
-Creative MineCraft game
-Survival MineCraft game
PROCEDURE:- 1. Take the groups heart rate before the game starts.
2. Play the relaxing game for 15 minutes (Minecraft Creative).
3. Measure each groups heart rate in order after game is played (first group tested to last group).
4. Play the survival game for 15 minutes (Minecraft Survival).
5. Measure each groups heart rate after game is played (first group tested to last group).
6. Record all data in the journal.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN:
The things we are going to try to keep constant in this study are:
• room we tested in.
• devices used to measure heart rate (heart monitor, miofuse watches).
• length subjects played the game.
• length of rest time between games.
Our manipulated variable was the video games.
The responding variable the heart rate between to video games.
DATA:
RESULTS:
Our results show that the average heart rate before playing MineCraft Creative mode was 93 BPM. and after the playing the game was 90 BPM. The average heart rate before playing MineCraft Survival mode was 79 BPM and after the playing the game was 98 BPM.
While subjects were playing MineCraft Creative mode, subject’s average heart rate was 87 BPM. While subjects were playing MineCraft Survival mode, subject’s average heart rate was 90 BPM.
While subjects were playing MineCraft Creative mode, the average subject’s max heart rate was 114 BPM. While subjects were playing MineCraft Survival mode, the average subject’s max heart rate was 120 BPM.
CONCLUSION:
The purpose of our investigation was to see if students heart rates will increase during a stressful game like Minecraft Survival and if they will decrease when students play a relaxing game like Minecraft Creative.We predicted that the Minecraft Survival mode will cause students heart rates to go up, because its more work to survive, and they might stress over dying and losing all their materials. Minecraft Creative does not have the same demands so will not cause stress and will not cause an increase in heart rate.
Our data did support our hypothesis. Our results clearly showed that the average heart rate increases while playing a more stressful game (Minecraft Survival) and the average heart rate decreased when playing a relaxing game (Minecraft Creative).
While subjects were playing MineCraft Creative mode, the average subject’s max heart was lower than when subjects were playing MineCraft Survival mode. This result supports our hypothesis.
IDEAS FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS?
If we were to do this experiment again:
- we would take the pre-game heart rate and post-game heart rate twice to verify the results.
- we would also alternate the order of the game modes to see if the results varied. This would ensure that our experiment was a “fair test”.
- we would try to get more subjects to test.
It would be interesting to compare heart rate results according to gender or according to experienced gamers and non experience gamers.
INFO ON THE HEART: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_rate#/media/File:Heart_Beating_Animation.gif