Poster Information
| Title | Creating Meaningful Education in a MMOG |
| Presenter(s) | Peter Smith, Clint Bowers and Jan Cannon-Bowers |
| Session | Conference Reception, Game Exhibition, and Poster Session |
| Time | Thursday, October 9, 6:00p-8:00p |
| Location | East Lansing Technology Innovation Center |
| Format | Poster Presentation |
| Description | Currently a startling 50% of entering freshman physics majors leave the discipline regardless of their GPA. That is, equal numbers of 4.0 students leave as 2.0 students, and the reason for this departure is commonly sited as an inability to envision themselves in the roll of a physicist. In an effort to combat this statistic the RETRO Lab setout to make an engaging Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) for physics education and make the content meaningful to the players, while providing a chance to practice being a physicist in a real world situation.
One of the biggest challenges was how to quickly and cheaply integrate educational content into the proposed MMO game. Designs based on deep integration of educational content and concepts proved to be difficult to design and create, and often "broke" the game design creating gameplay that didn't make sense or have much entertainment value. The main challenges were to not let the game content compromise the educational content nor the educational content compromise the game content. This challenge led to the development of the hybrid game concept where the educational content is separated from the MMO game content. This separation is accomplished by placing it in an external Web 2.0 environment. With this approach, the educational content is kept rooted in traditional pedagogical methods, while allowing easy integration into the game with some creative story telling. Development of the game (MMO) and educational (Web 2.0) content then becomes a set of almost parallel tasks which accelerates development plus greatly simplifies the task of integration. |