Serious games and higher education

A team of researchers from UW-Madison, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is working to develop “augmented-reality” games played with the aid of handheld devices. Their work is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and a Star School grant from the U.S. Department of Education. In one example, a handheld smart phone with an attached global positioning system (GPS) device is employed. The students interview virtual characters and visit actual sites where game events take place. They can go online to gather more information; they can investigate threats and develop corrective strategies as part of the game.

One scenario, developed by UW student James Matthews, casts the game player as a journalist covering the events of October 1967 at UW-Madison, when campus protests against Dow Chemical Co. erupted into violence. The game player encounters various incidents as he or she walks up Bascom Hill. The student writes a story and later compares it with reporting from 1967. "This is an easy fit in higher education" says Kurt Squire, an assistant professor in the School of Education and lead investigator on the project.

"It grew out of work we’d done at MIT to help environmental engineering students better understand the realities of doing fieldwork. The game player would get a phone call involving a toxic spill or some other environmental cleanup issue. In dealing with the problem, the students would have to account for such factors as budget and time. They would have to deal with the question, ‘What is good enough?’ It gave them the experience of doing environment science. It was real-world experience".

Another game application, designed to help Physics students grasp the concepts of electrostatics and magnetism, capitalizes on the graphics and interactivity of games. The fundamental concepts were not intuitive, so MIT physicist John Belcher developed computer-based visualizations for the students. "That helped" says Squire, "but students merely watched what was happening. There was no interactivity". So Squire and his colleagues worked with Belcher to put the students into the game. "We made the game player a charged particle that has to move through a field" he says. "The student created the visualizations". "There are lots of powerful opportunities here" says Squire. "With these games, you get the complexity of interactions. The potential for learning is unlimited".