1st note:
Check it out! Valve talked about me in their Games for Change talk (especially around 6:57, 17:00, 25:30, and 27:40)!
2nd note:
If you found this blog through Games for Change, welcome! It’s good to have you! I’ll hopefully post another video later today that will demonstrate a lesson plan using momentum flings.
Valve’s Teach with Portals website is now live! I highly recommend checking out the lesson plan section. If you go there now, you’ll find some physics lesson plans written by yours truly! Check them out and let me know what you think!
Check out another example of making a physics problem come to life. This problem came from a conceptual physics textbook and easily translates to the Puzzle Maker.
For some reason, one physics problem that has stuck with me since I was an undergrad is the “shoot the coconut” problem. The scenario involves a coconut falling from a tree and another projectile being thrown or launched at it. Students have to calculate the right angle and velocity of the projectile to hit the coconut before it hits the ground.
The Puzzle Maker is perfect for bringing physics problems to life. Here’s my take on shooting coconuts in Portal 2.
Let’s do a little bit of informal physics to calculate the velocity of cube 2 when launched. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll label the falling cube C1, and the launched cube C2.
C1 falls about 13 panels (units) before striking C2. Using the equation for displacement, we find that it takes about
t = sqrt (2*h/g) (1)
to reach the point of impact. By equation 1, t = 2.35 s. That is, of course, without air resistance. Taking into account air resistance and the amount of time it takes for the cube to actually leave its dispenser give us t = 3.6 s (calculated with a stopwatch, by the way).
It takes almost 2.7 s for C2 to drop, roll, hit the AFP and get launched through the air (this number actually varies from test to test because cubes don’t always leave their dispensers in exactly the same way).
That leaves us with about 1.1 s for C2 to leave the angled panel, fly through the air and strike C1 as it falls. C2 leaves the orange portal at an angle, θ = 45 degrees and has to travel 4 panels in the x-direction to reach C1. So, in the x-direction, C2 has a velocity, vx = 3.6 u/s. Using trigonometry, we start with
vx = v*cos(θ) (2)
and then rearrange to find
v = vx/cos(θ) (3)
which tells us the initial velocity of C2. After plugging in our variables, equation 3 tells us that C2 has an initial velocity of v = 6.9 u/s.
Gotta love physics.
Physics classrooms are behind the times. At school, kids use 1990s technology (if they use technology at all) but then go home and play ultra realistic games. [Sidenote: if you clicked on the first link in this sentence, you found PhET, run by CU Boulder, which I actually use all the time. I don’t mean to bash PhET at all because it’s actually awesome and shows some great examples of physics simulators. They’re perfect in many cases for their ease and utility in the classroom. But there’s a big difference between them and modern games.] There’s a huge disconnect between what kids are exposed to and used to in terms of technology and what we give them in school. It’s no wonder that students are falling behind in science.
But we can adapt.
As teachers, we’re receiving students with the built-in capability to be fully immersed within game worlds. Why not use those same skills and game worlds to teach them physics? Give them something they’re used to and simply reroute their attention from killing each other (which is, unfortunately, what normally happens within games) to building physics experiments. It isn’t much of a leap, especially considering that Portal 2 is, at its core, one big physics puzzle after another.
We’re wasting valuable resources when we don’t harness our students’ innate ability to use technology and lose themselves in game worlds. Using some careful planning, teachers can create a classroom environment where students manipulate digital worlds to create measurable scientific experiments that run on laws of physics. It’s a unique opportunity for educators. For the first time, we can let students play god and design their own worlds. We can put students in impossible situations (for safety concerns or otherwise) that run on actual laws of physics and instruct them to run tests and see what’s going on behind the scenes. They can build their own virtual experiments as valid as their physical counterparts in less time and with less effort. Teaching with Portal 2 is about students actively building and applying what they’ve learned.
Basically, Portal 2 is a tool that allows for easy creation, manipulation and sharing of virtual worlds that run on actual laws of physics. What can be done with it is only limited by the creativity of the educator.
Physics with Portals 