Kids explore moon, space through educational video games |
| Kids explore moon, space through educational video games Posted: 14 Feb 2011 04:36 AM PST February 14, 2011 · The Center for Educational Technologies at Wheeling Jesuit is using video games as an educational tool. The center is developing games about the moon that allow students to conduct their own science experiments. The Center for Educational Technologies at Wheeling Jesuit University wants to make science fun for students as a way to encourage them to pursue careers in the field. One way the center is accomplishing its goal is through a video game called MoonWorld. "One of the things we created is a simulation which you see here about the moon about going to the moon and working as astronauts on the surface of the moon to try to explore it. Here you see they are suiting up and ready to go out onto the surface. ""The idea of this is not to have students learn so much about the moon, but to learn how to observe, to learn how to make deductions from their observations, to learn to work in teams. It comes across looking like a game and it is but it is an educational game that has strong educational goals and methodology to help the students achieve them," said Chuck Wood, lunar scientist and director of the CET. MoonWorld has been available on-line for about a year, but a recently released version targets young children. The game allows players to work independently or in groups to explore and conduct their own research as astronauts. "We modeled the features of the playing field of the moon, an actual crater on the moon, we have scaled the size of the crater on the simulation to what it really is. We have added different types of features on the surface of the moon geologic features that are actually there. "The goal of this is to make it so realistic and the astronauts outfits and the rovers so realistic that the kids completely get engaged in it and then one of the benefits of this is because it is so realistic you can go outside with binoculars or a telescope in the evening and actually see that same crater on the moon that you were driving a rover around on the simulation," said Wood. The center also developed another video gamed called Selene, named after the Greek Goddess of the moon. It's designed for ages nine and up and is a single player game. Debbie Denise Reese, senior educational researcher at the CET helped develop Selene. The game uses familiar experiences, analogies and metaphors to help the children understand challenging science concepts. "Selene starts out as a cinematic view of how the solar system formed and that is the concept of accretion and then how the early Earth formed and then how the giant impact happened that created the particles that created the proto moon," said Reese. The decisions students make while playing MoonWorld and Selene are recorded and stored in a database. "We can take the game play data from many, many students and say this is where they learned, this is where they had trouble, or individual profiles and in the bigger, bigger picture when we have hundreds, thousands of instructional games that are wonderful we can have profiles of our learners what they know, what they don't know, what they are prepared to learn," said Reese. Reese recently tested the game with some Ohio County students, including Carla Nelson, a seventh grader from Triadelphia Middle School. "I'm learning a lot about the space, and about the moon, and the density, and the heat and the radiation of the moon and it is fun to play and you do learn a lot about it so. You get to fling asteroids to make your own moon and that is pretty fun," said Nelson. Both video games can be played through the CET website. Minors need a guardian to complete a consent form before playing. The CET hopes to get the video games into schools across the country. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| You are subscribed to email updates from kids games - Yahoo! News Search Results To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 comments:
Post a Comment