Researchers Mod Unreal Tournament to Teach Science
Researchers have demonstrated that with minimum efforts and skill, teachers can create educational serious games, by just modding existing first person shooter games, which are very popular among students. Students who tested felt that, this could be used in high schools, however male testers reacted different as compared to female testers.
Gaming technology has been heavily focused on “entertainment games”, while the other type of games – “serious games”, are heavily ignored mainly due to the less monetary profit got from them. Educational serious games, whose purpose is to be educative, have been characterized with realistic activities, such as performing experiments in a laboratory or the like. However the games as such do not offer anything interesting (other than education) as compared to the entertainment games, especially first person shooters. First person shooters are very popular among students and are usually very task/mission oriented. Teachers and researchers have been hoping to tap into this interest among students towards the first person shooters, to use them for educative purposes.
However, game development is not an easy task and involves heavy resources, which makes it almost impossible for teachers to handle with. A group of researchers saw this need and decided to try to mod an existing game and test the efficiency. Unreal Tournament is already popular among the research community and has been analyzed for it physics capabilities, suggesting that UnrealEd (the map editor of the game) could be used in classrooms to demonstrate various physics theories and properties.
