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Valve has teamed up with educators to make their games user-friendly for the classroom.
TeachwithPortals.com provides several lesson plans in physics, geometry, language arts and
chemistry. Valve has also provided teachers with a puzzle-maker for Portal 2 which gives
teachers more control over the design of the game and lets them (or even students) create their
own puzzles for students to solve.
Quest Atlantis (Sasha Barab and Melissa Gresalfi)
http://atlantisremixed.org
Quest Atlantis is an international online 3D game for children from 9 to 15 that features scientific
inquiry. It has many different units that encourage children to take on the roles of scientists,
doctors, reporters and statisticians. The Ander City statistics unit explores data sets and how they
can be used deceitfully. Another unit explores ethics and language arts by using the book
Frankenstein as a platform; students have to decide whether to use a scientist’s living creation as
a test subject for a cure that could save the city’s citizens. Most of the units inspire social action,
such as the Taiga Water Quality unit. As expressed on their website, “Taiga best exemplifies the
potential for connecting content with context by supporting students' experience of the
consequentiality of their actions. For example, after students have begun to learn about potential
causes of the fish demise in Taiga Park, they are asked to make a recommendation about how to
resolve the issue. In making this decision, students have to consider their conceptual tools (i.e.
understanding eutrophication, erosion, and overfishing) in order to make a recommendation
about what to do (i.e. stop the indigenous people from farming, tell the loggers they can no
longer cut trees in the park, or shut down the game fishing company).”
River City (Harvard University)
http://muve.gse.harvard.edu/rivercityproject
River City is a 3D virtual environment that aims to facilitate 21
st
century skills and scientific
inquiry. As explained on the website, “River City Curriculum is interdisciplinary in scope,
spanning the domains of ecology, health, biology, chemistry, and earth science, as well as
history. Three diseases simultaneously affect health in River City, based on historical, social, and
geographical content. As students explore these diseases, they learn how disease is spread and
how human interactions can have effects far from the initial site. This situation allows students to
experience the realities of identifying a problem, investigating it, and delineating the multiple
causes that underlie a complex phenomenon. Students follow multiple threads that potentially
lead to very different hypotheses and experiments. This helps refute the common belief that there
is one right answer to any science experiment.” The game is a 17-hour course that is designed to
replace existing class lectures.
Roller Coaster Tycoon (Chris Sawyer Productions)
http://www.rollercoastertycoon.com
Roller Coaster Tycoon is a commercial construction and management game where players
design roller coasters and also the theme park they exist in. Players have to overcome and utilize
different forces like momentum and gravity. The player’s rides must carefully choose the
direction, loops (corkscrews, vertical loops, zero gravity rolls), and height of their rides to meet