A small group of engineers and computer programmers in
the Applied Physics
Laboratory's
Global Engagement Department is applying its simulation and
visual expertise to develop educational
video games. The work is part of Learning Games to Go, an
initiative supported by a $15 million
Department of Education grant to Maryland Public Television
to help kids who are struggling with
traditional instructional methods by using digital learning
games.
The collaboration — which also includes the
Johns Hopkins Center for
Technology Education, the
Education Arcade at MIT, several Maryland school districts,
cutting-edge technology developers and
education experts — is at the forefront of a "serious
games" movement to deliver educational content
through compelling game environments. Like commercial
games, they harness a child's natural
competitiveness and keep their interest, says Jim Miller,
APL's project manager for Learning Games to
Go.
"Kids today learn keyboarding as early as 4 years old;
gaming and interacting with computers is
an everyday and lifelong experience," Miller says. "If we
can harness the technology available to make
education games compelling and feature-rich, we could
really engage students so that they don't want
to stop playing or learning."
Dave Peloff, the program director of emerging
technologies at the Center for Technology
Education, says that rapid improvements in computer
graphics are making it easier than ever to create
detailed, 3-D environments. "The possibilities are endless
in terms of serious games," he says. "Using
virtual reality to model a real-world environment allows
for experimentation and exploration in ways
that are impossible, expensive or impractical
otherwise."
That's where APL comes in. Miller has been developing
synthetic environments since 1999, as
part of the Navy's Advanced SEAL Delivery System
Operator/Trainer project. He has developed
synthetic environments for the Submarine Onboard Training
program, a Web-enabled simulation
prototype and an unmanned aerial vehicle prototype. He and
his team will reuse a sophisticated suite
of frameworks from the Advanced SEAL Delivery System
project to develop a high-fidelity
multiplayer simulation of a search-and-rescue operation
that will use physics-based vehicular models
and 3-D effects to achieve a realistic environment.
"The project does have some technical hurdles that my
team hasn't had to face in the past," he
says. "We'll need to use five or more monitors so that up
to five students can work collaboratively
while interacting with the game. This involves a
distributed rendering approach that will synchronize
the synthetic environment across multiple computers while
at the same time allowing each student to
independently interact with the system from their input
device, whether it is a joystick/throttle
combination or a mouse and keyboard."
For the first time, the team will also have to animate
human characters. "The students will have
to interview avatars [virtual representations of the game's
users]," Miller says, "and the avatars will
speak, blink and show emotion in response to questioning by
the students."
Miller says that working on this project has opened a
creative door for his team of engineers.
"Our work really focuses on modeling and simulation to
conjure up a real vehicle, such as a
submarine for the military," he says. "Most of these
projects focus on the 'driver's education' aspect
of the vehicle and don't focus on the 'fun' aspect that a
game would provide. So developing the 'fun' will
be new for our team."
The team is drawing heavily on the expertise of APL's
mentor students and college interns.
"This influx of young people really helps keep us older
folks in tune with what is fun for the younger
generations," Miller says.
Ultimately, he says, the students must be engaged and
interested for an educational game of
any kind to succeed. "If a game engages a person for more
than a half hour the first time the person
plays it, the game will most likely be successful," he
says. "This 'magical first half-hour' must grab the
student's attention and compel that student to keep
playing. That's going to be a huge challenge for
us."
This story appeared previously in The APL
News.