Video Game Teaches Teens About Electricity
Marie Donlon | July 25, 2018
Screenshot from Wired. Source: Diarmid CampbellHoping to encourage a greater interest in engineering among teenagers, researchers at the University of Cambridge have designed a new video game that explains the ins and outs of electricity through a series of puzzle-solving exercises.
Called Wired, the video game teaches teens the mathematical concepts underlying electricity — something that affects everyone on a daily basis but that is difficult to teach and to visualize.
"A video game is an ideal way to teach students about electricity as it allows players to visualise the underlying concepts and the relationships between them," said Diarmid Campbell from Cambridge's Department of Engineering, and the game's designer. "It provides a structure for incremental challenges, each one building on previous ones, and there is a set of tried and tested motivational techniques that can encourage people to push through tricky areas."
Playing Wired, according to its developers, gives players a crash course in circuits, voltage, current, resistance and the logic of switches. Players gain an understanding of these features by wiring up circuits in order to solve problems within the video game environment.
"Most educational games are delivered through the classroom and only need to be more fun than the lesson they are replacing," said Campbell. "Wired will be delivered through gaming websites, so it needs to be at least as fun as other video games that people play. We are not gamifying education; we are edu-fying, and perhaps even edifying, a game."
Considering that electricity is intangible, it is difficult for children to develop any intuition around the subject matter. Wired gives students a chance to develop such intuition instead of only learning about the mathematics behind electricity, according to Campbell.
"Students are often told that electricity behaves like water flowing through pipes — which gets you some of the way there, but actually, people don't really understand how water behaves either," said Campbell. "How many people can tell you why the shower changes temperature when you flush the toilet?"
To download Wired, go to SteamPowered.com.
Video games can be very useful to payers in learning new technologies and their application through video games. It is one of the most effective ways to make them understand and visualize the application of the technology. This is a really great article that gives information about the ways in which video games can teach electric circuits and their designing for teens. We can find many new games with the virtual reality, augmented reality, like the FIFA 18 kaufen, Destiny 2, etc. that we can easily find online at Instant-gaming online store.