With
so many students being avid gamers, providing coursework within video games
offers a chance to make learning more relevant and show how the concepts being
studied can be applied outside the classroom.
To
that end, Texas A&M University, College Station, gave researchers a
$100,000 grant to commercialize 3-D video games in calculus and art history/appreciation
as supplements to standard coursework. The games are offered by Triseum LLC, a
company that grew from the Texas A&M Department of Visualization’s Learning Interactive Visualization Experience (LIVE) Lab. Triseum’s CEO is also founder
and director of the LIVE Lab and an assistant professor teaching game design
and development at the university.
In Variant:
Limits, players work to save a fictional planet from imminent destruction by
assisting the game’s protagonist in solving a series of increasingly complex
calculus problems. Prompts within the game allow students to refresh themselves
on theory or firm up the concepts involved.
The
one-month, one-credit elective isn’t a replacement for a normal calculus
course, but is instead intended to keep students motivated and engaged with the
subject to boost retention. Of those who voluntarily took the course last year,
about 72% said it increased their knowledge. When a high-school teacher in
Milan, Italy, assigned Variant as homework for her calculus class, she saw the
pass rate on her final exam rise from 80% the previous year to
100%, with grades overall notching up by 10%.
“Much
of the content in the game was new for them, yet I didn’t have to push them to
get through it,” she wrote in a blog post. “They wanted to apply what they were
learning throughout the game so they could see what would happen next.”
Triseum’s
ARTé: Mecenas game positions players as a member of the Medici family in
Renaissance Italy to discover how local and international economic policies and
negotiations influenced art patronage and the creation of artistic masterworks.
