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Monday, March 26, 2018

Calculus Gets Gamified at Texas A&M

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.

A mathematician who helped develop Variant said the games could be expanded into a suite of games to cover their subjects more comprehensively.