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.
Two different mods were designed. The first mod called SolubilityFPS, had the player starting in an empty warehouse with some ammunition and crates on the floor and four doors to other rooms along one side. The player was expected to enter each room to find an armed monster ready to shoot and kill him. The player already carried two fantasy rifle-like projectile weapons that he can swap between a green gun and a red gun. The green gun was used to represent metaphorically the collection of grams of the salt Ba(NO3)2 (Barium Nitrate) that will be added to the water which was represented by a monster. Shooting the blue monster with the green gun was metaphorically equivalent to adding 5 grams of the salt to the solution. The red gun was used to represent the temperature of the water. Each shot on the monster with the red gun represents heating the water by an amount of 5 degrees Centigrade. Once a monster was killed it represents reaching a point on the solubility curve for the salt Ba(NO3)2. There were 4 monsters in total giving 4 point on the curve that will help the player to draw the solubility curve of that particular salt in a workbook. The HUD displayed two bars: a red bar to represent the shots counted from the red gun (representing the water temperature) and a green bar representing a percentage figure which was the concentration level of the chemical in solution. The game had danger in that monsters aggressively shoot back at the player and if a door was open for too long a monster can escape from his room and continue pursuing the player. Doors opened based on a proximity trigger, allowing the monsters to pursue the player. The monster pursuing and shooting at the player had the metaphorical correspondence of the challenge that the concept of solubility curves has to the students understanding.
The second mod, called ChemlabFPS, player had to hunt down monsters, each of whom represented different solutions. Shooting each one of them, added specific quantities of the corresponding solution to beakers shown in the HUD. The player had to shoot the monsters in different rooms to collect the required quantity of solutions to achieve a mission, which completed the chemical reaction, displaying the color of the precipitant and chemical formula.
All of the student testers played both of the games and answered surveys (one survey prior to the games) and one after each game. Statistical analysis on the surveys indicated that the students liked both of the games (4 on a scale of 5) and expressed that they would play the games again. However male students played the games for longer times and also indicated more liking as compared to the females, who had played less first person shooters prior to this experiment as compared to the male students. Female students were skeptical about the games helping them learning the topic. However, all of the students indicated that a better introduction to the game would have helped. A typical introductory movie played in FPS games, would have been affective in this situation. All of the students expressed that they felt that this method would benefit high school students.
The mods were performed by two gaming laboratory students in about two weeks and the researchers estimate that teachers with no game development skills could do the same in about two months.
Journal Reference: doi:10.1155/2009/456763
