In an undergraduate class at Brandeis University, chemistry lessons have moved from textbooks to computer games.
Mason Inman
For most teachers, the ready availability of video games on students’ cell phones and laptops can be a source of frustration in class. But in an introductory chemistry class at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, one professor is encouraging his students to play computer games and even giving extra credit to top scorers.
Chemistry professor Irving Epstein is working with a group at MIT to develop and test a game that he hopes will capture the attention of students and help them to better understand key concepts in science by giving them a new and more interactive way to explore and play with those ideas.
“It occurred to me that this generation of students plays a lot of video games,” he says. So he enlisted the help of Eric Klopfer, head of MIT’s Teacher Education Program, and his group to come up with a game that would test students’ understanding of the ideal gas law (PV = nRT, that is, the pressure and volume of a gas is determined by the amount of the gas and its temperature)—a concept that has an especially soporific effect on the class, says Epstein.
Klopfer’s group is also developing other games to teach undergraduates and middle and high school students a variety of subjects, from evolution to math.
A different kind of ball game
The gas law video game, called the Ball Game, is now being tested by Epstein’s students. In it, dozens of randomly moving balls, representing gas molecules, batter a two-dimensional box from the inside and outside. As the balls, which move at different speeds, strike the sides of the box, they cause it to fluctuate in size.
This computer game is designed to teach chemistry undergraduate students the ideal gas law.
The objective of the game is to hold the box’s area close to a given target area; the closer the box size is to that target area, the more points a player scores. Players can accelerate some of the balls by hitting them with a burst of flame, or slow them down by means of a cool whirlwind.
“It allows [students] to do their own experiments,” Epstein says. His students are playing the game as part of his chemistry class; they receive extra credit for getting a high score or for writing an essay about what they learned from the game.
Ravi Purushotma, a graduate student in Klopfer’s group, developed the Ball Game over the summer. “It seems there’s a huge disconnect between the way we’re taught to investigate scientific phenomena and the way we actually do it,” Purushotma says. Researchers often explore ideas and make discoveries through thought experiments; computer games can help students visualize and work with concepts in a similar way, he says.
Incorporating video games into university classwork is an unusual approach, says Peter Bruns of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which is funding Epstein’s work on chemistry games. HHMI is funding one other group developing similar games for science education.
Evolution in your palm
Meanwhile, Klopfer’s team is also working on a game called Palmagotchi to teach high school students, and perhaps college students as well, about evolutionary biology and ecology. It runs on Palm PDAs and is modeled after Tamagotchis—handheld games that simulate a pet, which you “feed” and care for over the course of days or months by pushing buttons.
Palmagotchi was inspired by Charles Darwin’s famous observations of finches on the Galapagos Islands. From one founder species, the birds have evolved into several different species, each inhabiting its own island.
In Palmagotchi, each player has a different island of birds to maintain and an island of flowers from which the birds can feed. Because their PDAs are connected wirelessly, players can interbreed their bird populations. The aim is for players to select the best mates to ensure the survival of their birds. For example, a player might choose a mate with a longer beak for feeding from long, slim flowers.
Games such as these can help students grasp abstract notions such as the ideal gas law, Epstein says. “A lot of chemistry is trying to make connections between a microscopic picture and macroscopic things we can see, such as hardness or temperature.” Games, he adds, can help students understand these connections and offer “real possibility to give students more intuition.”