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Friday, June 24, 2005

OrgoFrag Demo

Inspired by Amy Bellinger's post on the use of games for education (with links to Steven Bell and Rodney Riegel), I converted a small portion of my organic chemistry quizzes to a map in Unreal Tournament (Game of the Year Edition).

The player navigates through a map with organic chemistry reactions on the walls. Walking through a correct reaction leads to more exploration of the map and goodies like weapons, ammo or health. Walking through an incorrect reaction leads to death by falling into a deep dark pit.

I recorded a brief demo (using Camtasia) as a Flash screencast. The player first looks around and goes through a wall with a correct reaction. This leads to a sniper rifle, which is then used to blow up a few sludge barrels. At the end, the player walks through an incorrect reaction and falls into the abyss. It was somewhat taxing on the processor to run the game at the same time as Camtasia so the video and the sound are a bit choppy but you should get the idea.

There are many ways to play in Unreal Tournament: in teams or alone, capture the flag or death match, with bots or simply alone (as done in the demo). The best organic students should do better since they would have access to more of the map and every time the player dies by falling in a pit, they lose a frag.

This is a pretty general way to convert a multiple choice test into a map and I would like to hear from other educators who have done similar things or anyone who would be interested in collaborating.

I'll see about putting this up on a server to further demonstrate.

1 Comments:

  • Awesome! Keep it up... there has got to be a way to leverage the power of gaming to create learning environments.

    It's a pretty real thing inside the game - Get the right reaction, get a new sniper rifle. Get the wrong reaction, fall to your death.

    thank you for pushing the idea forward!

    By Blogger Newman, at 3:49 AM  

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