Video Games in the Classroom - Portal

I want to take a moment to talk about the use of video games in education of other subjects. Student interest in Math and Science is often lacking in the elementary and high school grades, particularly with female students (If you don’t believe me, ask which of your lady friends is a physics major). I want to begin this series with one of the most critically acclaimed properties in recent memory, the excellent Portal games.

For those of you who are uninitiated, Portal and Portal 2 follow the protagonist Chell as she is subjected to a variety of physics based puzzles which rely on the use of a gun which can create portals on flat surfaces. Need to get across a bottomless chasm? Throw a portal up on the opposite wall, place the second on your side, and walk on through.

Loved for its gameplay design and dead pan humor, Portal relies on a player’s ability to manipulate physics in general to complete goals. I believe that if we used portions of this game when teaching the general concepts of physics to children in middle and high school, it will not only generate better interest in the subject, but also help those who find the subject difficult better understand the concepts.

Let’s look at one obvious point to generate interest: Two strong “female” characters. I have female in quotes because technically the antagonist GLaDOS is a computer, but since she has a female voice we’ll just say she’s female. In a game almost devoid of other humans, it’s surprising that both the main protagonist and antagonist be female, a rarity in video games today. You never know how children will respond to seeing a heroine portrayed as such, tasked with completing such science based problems, but it would be interesting to see how this fact could be exploited.

But the main point I would like to make is how a general physics classroom could exploit sections of this video game to help kids understand the basic principles of Newtonian Physics. Are kids having trouble understanding how gravity affects an object in flight? Show that the forward component of motion is independent of the force of gravity by throwing yourself through a variety of portals at different angles and speeds. Need to show them what you mean by conservation of momentum? Show that the speed built up through one portal is conserved when you exit the other. Put an object in an infinite portal loop to show that an object will accelerate to terminal velocity, which is a balance between gravity and the force of friction of the air. For those students who have trouble with theoretical equations and need visual examples to understand how these laws of physics work, the ability to visualize and interact with virtual objects that can be manipulated to prove a point can be invaluable.

Valve has recently released an SDK which allows anyone to go in and build environments to play within. This means that a teacher would not be confined to the layout of puzzle rooms designed for a game and instead build an environment specifically designed to show core physical concepts. With this much control, a teacher would be able to include as much or as little of Portal into his core curriculum.

Even mainstream games can have uses as an educational tool, and it's important to keep an open mind about how and when video games can be used as a teaching tool. The better we understand how to use games to teach children, the better we can create games with a better educational focus.