Philip Tan

Entering the education arcade

Responding to social, economic, and technological trends which make games the most powerful medium for reaching young learners, The Education Arcade project, based in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, seeks to prototype games that teach, develop curricular materials which support existing commercial titles, and help prepare teachers to use games in the classroom. This article reports on the first three prototypes that are producing -- Supercharged! (electromagnetism), Environmental Detectives (environmental science) and Revolution (American History).

The game studies practicum: applying situated learning to teach professional practices

The inclusion of a practicum is one of the main challenges in the game studies curriculum, especially when it comes to teaching professional practices to students. This paper presents how professional management methodologies (Scrum, in this case) can be related to models of Situated Learning, as we demonstrate through our case study, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Being aware of the connections and the pedagogical potential of professional practices can improve both how we teach and how our students learn how game development works. In our case study we also propose ways in which the practicum can be related to research in videogames.

Mining balanced sequential patterns in RTS games

The video game industry has grown enormously over the last twenty years, bringing new challenges to the artificial intelligence and data analysis communities. We tackle here the problem of automatic discovery of strategies in real-time strategy games through pattern mining. Such patterns are the basic units for many tasks such as automated agent design, but also to build tools for the professionally played video games in the electronic sports scene. Our formalization relies on a sequential pattern mining approach and a novel measure, the balance measure, telling how a strategy is likely to win. We experiment our methodology on a real-time strategy game that is professionally played in the electronic sport community.

Seeing and Experiencing Relativity: A New Tool for Teaching?

“What would you see if you were riding a beam of light?” This thought experiment, which Einstein reports to have “conducted” at the age of 16,1 of course has no sensible answer: as Einstein published a decade later, you could never reach the speed of light.2 But it does make sense to ask what you would see if you were traveling close to the speed of light, and one of the first physicists to embark on this effort was George Gamow in his Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland.3 His protagonist is speeding on a bicycle through a city where the speed of light is lower, thus ingeniously taking advantage of the fact that special relativity scales with v/c: for it to kick in, you either have to move very fast (in rather unfamiliar territory), or light has to be slow (in which case special relativity kicks in at everyday velocities in everyday situations). Gamow provides drawings of what Mr. Tompkins and people at the curb would see in this slow-light city, at least, what they would see if one only took into account two of t...

Iterative game design in education

Educators should impart principles of iterative game design to their students as a best practice. Iterative processes allow player feedback to systematically inform design decisions. However, the constraints and conventions of academic practices pose several challenges for the adoption of iterative processes. Many students lack the confidence in their own abilities and the discipline to work in short iterations. A constant stream of testers is necessary for iterative design and providing that stream requires advance planning. Misinterpreting tester feedback can badly hurt morale. Finally, the tendency of both game development and academia to focus on a finished product may actually distract students from practicing the habits needed to conduct effective iterative design. Based on the student projects of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, this short paper looks into each of these challenges and proposes some potential solutions for introducing iterative game design in a higher education context.

A Pattern Mining Approach to Study Strategy Balance in RTS Games

Whereas purest strategic games such as Go and Chess seem timeless, the lifetime of a video game is short, influenced by popular culture, trends, boredom, and technological innovations. Even the important budget and developments allocated by editors cannot guarantee a timeless success. Instead, novelties and corrections are proposed to extend an inevitably bounded lifetime. Novelties can unexpectedly break the balance of a game, as players can discover unbalanced strategies that developers did not take into account. In the new context of electronic sports, an important challenge is to be able to detect game balance issues. In this paper, we consider real-time strategy (RTS) games and present an efficient pattern mining algorithm as a basic tool for game balance designers that enables one to search for unbalanced strategies in historical data through a knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process. We experiment with our algorithm on StarCraft II historical data, played professionally as an electronic sport.

Visualizing relativity: The OpenRelativity project

We present OpenRelativity, an open-source toolkit to simulate effects of special relativity within the popular Unity game engine. Intended for game developers, educators, and anyone interested in physics, OpenRelativity can help people create, test, and share experiments to explore the effects of special relativity. We describe the underlying physics and some of the implementation details of this toolset with the hope that engaging games and interactive relativistic “laboratory” experiments might be implemented.

“I Just Don’t Know Where to Begin”: Designing to Facilitate the Educational Use of Commercial, Off-the-Shelf Video Games

This chapter documents the process and preliminary results of a two year project in which a team of MIT researchers, in close collaboration with local educators, designed and tested supplemental teaching resources for supporting educators in implementing the use of commercial, off-the-shelf games in their secondary level, humanities (e.g. social studies, history, languages) classrooms. The chapter also provides an overview of similar research in the field of game-based learning and addresses challenges likely to be encountered in such implementation processes, particularly in the American public educational context.