Reframe: Using Pop Culture For Energy

I think something we need to consider when talking about science education is how it is framed for students in the classroom. Facts are often given in a vacuum: they come from a textbook with very little context and few connections to a student's world at large. But what if we brought what kids cared about into the classroom, engaged what they know with what we want to teach? I think that we can reframe the discussion on energy topics to include video game and other pop culture references, increasing student interest, and maybe even turn some of them into scientists in the process.

I want to start by giving an example of how to introduce several types of energy technology to kids with the Fallout video game series. The Fallout universe is one in which 50's era cold war mentality and atomic age technology were never abandoned, resulting in a future where cars are powered by nuclear reactors and vacuum tubes were the cornerstone of computer technology. Energy is of great importance in this universe, since the nuclear war which caused the game's post-apocalyptic setting was a result of a resource war brought on by the depletion of petroleum reserves. As the player works through the wasteland of what used to be the United States, he comes across a variety of things which can be used as a tie in to various energy technologies. For example, in the game Fallout: New Vegas, the player comes across a solar complex that uses concentrated sunlight on a central tower to generate energy. The climax of the game also takes place on the Hoover Dam, which given scarcity of resources in the game universe is a very valuable commodity.

By tying lessons about petroleum, nuclear energy, or natural resources to examples form the Fallout games, students become more involved with their own learning, using these visual examples to better understand more complex concepts. These examples can be used as a humorous introduction to nuclear topics, with pictures of the mutated inhabitants used to illustrate how the public views nuclear energy. They can also be used as an example of where the game got things right, and where they are exaggerating facts for fictional use. They can also be used as simply a way to connect with kids who are uninterested, a way of bringing in those who are on the fence about listening at all.

These are, of course, mature themes which need to be assessed by the teacher using them. But I believe that these examples can be used to generate more interest in learning, and even cause students to retain knowledge better. The more involved and engaged they become in the learning process, the better they are able to grasp the concepts important to the lesson.

How Video Games Already Penetrate the Green Movement

Leaderboards, Achievements, Friends Lists, Level Progression. Though not unique to video games, these features are some of the most prominent things that have made the jump into the non-gaming world. The word "Gamification" has been coined to describe the trend, where video game mechanics, thinking, and constructs are used in non-gaming applications in order to increase engagement and use. If you want clear examples of how this has been done, look no further than the green energy movement.

The incorporation of game elements in green projects didn't come around suddenly. One of the first high profile examples started with the release of the Toyota Prius hybrid car. Outfitted with digital displays on gas and power usage, the driver was given a visual display that graphed the gas mileage over time. Though subtle, this display became the starting point for friendly competition among family members. Suddenly, mothers were tracking their mileage, and fathers were silently judging their children on how much the the graph has dropped since loaning out the car last Friday night. Social competition became the impetus for saving gas and saving money.

Prius Display - (Flickr user Listener42)

The Nissan Leaf looked at what worked before with the Prius and took it to the next level. By throwing a driver's data online and compiling it with anyone else who drove a Leaf, Nissan created world wide leaderboards which ranked people based on factors including energy economy and distance traveled. Competition among family members was not competition among neighbors, states, and countries. When everyone is competition to save energy, everyone ends up winning.

Gamification is not relegated to the hybrid and electric car market. Waste management and recycling is starting to incorporate an achievement and rewards system reminiscent of how video games try to get you to play more. Recyclebank, a service that works with Waste Connections, has put together a system where a customer's recyclables are weighted and points are given based on the amount recycled. These points can be redeemed for coupons and gift cards to popular stores. In the area where I live, only about 10% of the local population participated in the recycling program before Recyclebank came about. Now, participation has increased immensely, all because there's a small amount of incentive in turning your empty cans into discounts.

Recyclebank rewards - (Flickr user eagleapex)

This is just the beginning for the Gamification of green energy, and personally, I'm all for it. If we can get gamers to spend thousands of dollars on hats for their virtual characters, maybe we can use our powers to save a little energy in the process.

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.

The cost of Freemium

The purpose of any business, whether it be behind video games, education, or both, is to make money. Neural Energy Games is no different, and once these games come out, we will be looking for ways to generate profit. There are many ways to sell video games these days, but the one that is beginning to gain a lot of traction is the "Freemium" model. When I say freemium, I mean that the majority of the game will be playable for free, but portions of premium content will be accessible with money.

The decision to go with the freemium business model came after a lot of careful consideration, since there are many ways where it could go wrong. One ill effect from the free-to-play model comes from how it effects the way kids view hard work and value. Consider a game where your character needs to become level 10 to compete against the next opponent. The player could spend hours training his character until it becomes level 10, or he could pay 5 dollars to have the character automatically leveled to 10 in a matter of seconds. Broken down to its basic level, this is basically telling kids that hard work is valuable, but not as valuable as cold, hard, cash. Even though, in a cynical view of the real world, this is basically how it works, it's probably not the greatest thing to feed into our students' heads that money is the solution to hard work.

I want to say that Neural Energy Games has a strong opinion on how free-to-play games should be structured in that game altering items will be kept at a minimum. We will strive to move away from the types of games which makes it basically impossible to compete with others or advance in the game without paying, and instead move towards models made popular by Valve, which is based heavily on virtual vanity items that are completely optional. Since we want the games we make to be education in nature, we want to make sure everything is as accessible to every student as possible.

Game First: Education Second

The perception of educational games as being "serious games" has a lot to do with how they're usually conceived. Most of the time, these games are thought of simply as a vehicle for feeding raw data into students, another way of getting the same type of information structured the same way as traditional lectures. Because of this, these games don't reach kids, they don't have fun with them, and the games don't get played. Quick experiment: Name an Educational Game. Got one? If you said "Math Blaster," congratulations! You've named a game that is over 20 years old and is usually the only example of an educational game a member of the general population can name. Unless you count Oregon Trail, where elementary school children learned dysentery was the number one killer of the west.

We, along with some other newer educational game companies, are beginning to take a different approach, focusing more on creating a fun and engaging game that kids will actually want to play. Instead of just taking paragraphs of information and shoehorning it into a matching game or trivia game, we work on creating games which make sense mechanically with the topic at hand.  With this in mind, we have many game concepts in the works, with several in the prototype stages. I know I've been teasing these games, and I do want to show them as soon as they're ready. However, I don't like putting out products which are ill-formed or half-baked, and we also need to think about protecting intellectual property, so it may still be a few weeks before they go live on the website.

Neural Energy Games will focus initially on putting out several smaller flash games, each tuned to a small aspect in a certain topic in energy. From solar cell function to how to run a nuclear plant, there are many opportunities for creating interesting games for students.

Welcome

Welcome to Neural Energy Games, LLC! This project has been a few months in the making, and we're just starting to build our web presence. My name is Charles Chin, and I'm a student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education currently working on a PhD in Energy Sciences and Engineering. Given my interest in Energy sciences as well as video games, I thought this was the perfect time to put the two together. The result: Neural Energy Games: a company devoted to the education of students in energy sciences and energy technology using video games. The goal is to create engaging and interesting games first and let the educational properties flow through organically after.

This blog will be the starting point for our future website and will detail the design process, as well as any interesting articles that might be interesting or pertinent. The next few posts will delve into the background on some of our early games, as well as some of the business and marketing side of things. We hope to see your support once these games come out of development and start to hit the web. Happy gaming!