Four college freshmen crowd around a TV, jostling around a video game that involves grabbing shapes to fill the cube on the screen. A “blip blip” sound fills the room, and players argue over whose turn it is. As much as this scene might seem to be kids taking a break from schoolwork, they’re actually doing schoolwork: learning about rotational motion in their college physics course.
The students are playing Little Big Planet, a PlayStation 3 game that has sold more than 5 million copies in the last three years. Although the game is far more typical in dorm rooms than classrooms, the University of Texas in Brownsville Conceptual Physics course uses games like this to teach the hard sciences to nonscience majors.
Teaching with video games, or what educators call “game-based learning,” is not new, but until recently, educators favored games created specifically for teaching. Even President Barack Obama has dedicated some staff to video game design, saying he wanted students to be “stuck on a video game that’s teaching you something other than just blowing things up,” according to USA Today.
He’s not, however, calling for schools to use shooting games like Call of Duty to teach mechanical engineering. Indeed, plenty of educators claim that commercial video games don’t actually teach much. But a subset of teachers from elementary schools through college are reaching for recreational video games, hoping to engage students, especially in science and math.
Dr. Soumya Mohanty, the professor who has taught UT’s Conceptual Physics course since 2011, said most video games incorporate real-time physics, even if most players don’t realize it.
“The strings that you create can sling objects, and the centripetal force is displayed as the object is pulled by the string,” Mohanty said. Mohanty coaches students as they apply speed and velocity formulas to calculate displacement and average velocity.
He also uses other commercial games like Uncharted 2 and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in the classroom to demonstrate ray-optics and thermodynamics. To Mohanty, the benefits of these popular games are obvious: They’re made by companies that spend millions of dollars designing the virtual environments to make them visually spectacular. “Educational games cannot hope to compare,” he said.
In a recent lesson, Mohanty created a moving car that allowed students to look outward from inside it to learn the concept of constant velocity. From within the virtual car, the students were able to throw objects and see the path those objects traveled, demonstrating the forces of momentum.
In evaluations last fall, 89 percent of students gave the course a full five-star rating. “Great class,” one student commented. “Often we know the concepts,” but through this class, “ ‘the mystery’ behind them” becomes clear.
The department has only five PlayStation 3 consoles, so for now, class size is limited to 20 students, and department chair Soma Mukherjee said the waiting list is long. The school plans to add 20 more game consoles this fall so the course can accommodate 50 students.
Some designers of educational video games argue that commercial video games are a poor substitute for traditional educational games. Jan Plass, a professor in digital media at New York University and co-director of Games for Learning Institute, acknowledged a renewed interest in using video games to teach, but said that even if popular games include concepts like projectile motion, players are so preoccupied with winning the game that any conceptual lessons escape them.
“It is very unlikely to find an off-the-shelf video game that really teaches,” Plass said.
Centennial High School in Corona, Calif., apparently doesn’t agree. Last summer, the math department decided to teach geometry and trigonometry to special education students using Minecraft, an online block-building video game that’s sold almost 10 million copies. The school even won a $40,000 grant to fund the program. Last fall, the school also began using the Minecraft program to teach algebra to 60 special education students.
Brian Kenney, Centennial’s computer programming instructor who had applied for the funding, said he wanted to teach with Minecraft because “lecture-based learning was just not working.”
“Some of our students, especially the ones in special ed, weren’t doing well in taking paper tests, so we thought of using another way to engage them,” he said.
Recently, students in Centennial High’s Minecraft math program measured buildings on campus, then recreated them using blocks inside the game. Kenney told students to assume each block in the game was equivalent to half a meter long. His goal: to teach students to think about proportions. More than anything, he wants students to realize how fun math is.
Cameron Pittman, who teaches at LEAD Academy High School in Nashville, Tenn., just finished teaching a semester of 11th-grade physics using Portal 2, a popular video game that has sold more than 4 million copies since 2011.
Portal 2 is a three-dimensional adventure game in which the player creates extra-dimension portals to travel through obstacles. Similar to Moses parting the Red Sea, the portals in the game make it possible for the player to walk through walls. Despite the fact that the basic premise of the game defies current understanding of quantum physics, Pittman sees the game as a teaching tool for demonstrating projectile motion and collisions.
By using the built-in puzzle-maker tool, Pittman created virtual spaces where his students must move blocks or jump over pitfalls. Through the exercise, he hopes students will better understand how much force is needed to move a cube of a specific mass, because while playing the game, they must use displacement equations to calculate force.
After setting the mass of the cube, the angle of launch, and the velocity the cube will travel, students can take out their calculators and find the displacement.
“You know how teachers move their hands to teach? Some students can’t really relate to that,” said Joseph Taliaferro, a junior at LEAD. “But with a game, you can really see that ‘an object in motion stays in motion.’ ”