Tag Archives: puzzle maker

05/01/2014
1 Comment
Physics Demonstrations

Newton’s Laws

Finally! After months of waiting, I’ve finally put together another PwP video. Check out the video below for a few simple demonstrations of Newton’s laws of motion in the Puzzle Maker.

Hey Nathan! Don’t forget, you owe me a blog post. Tell us about your class!

How I determined that propulsion gel accelerates you to 12 m/s2:

First, I measured the time it took to reach top speed on propulsion gel.

 

Breaking the video down frame-by-frame, you see that you reach a top speed of 800 u/s in ~1.3s. Remembering that acceleration = (change in velocity) / time lets us calculate acceleration in game units. Then, I convert game units to meters by using 128 u = 1 panel and 1 panel = 2.4 m (described in depth here) to find that the acceleration due to propulsion gel is 12 m/s2.

Advertisement
Tagged , , ,
18/02/2013
Leave a comment
Physics Demonstrations

student projects part 2

Here’s another level a student created as part of my fall semester exam.

Though this level may not have been the most exciting, it still clearly demonstrates three different aspects of mechanics. Along with her excellent paper, this student earned a 100 for this part of her exam.

If you’re asking yourself why this level doesn’t seem more exciting, I completely understand. This level, like most of the others I received, is fairly plain. The demonstrations are obvious and appear piecemeal. I wish my students had created astounding, complex masterpieces with demonstrations that link multiple aspects of physics with possibly some puzzles thrown in. But, as anyone who has ever tried to make a level could tell you, making complicated levels is difficult. Even my simple demonstration of a physics problem took me a few hours of tinkering to work correctly. Around exam time, it’d be unreasonable of me to expect my students to spend hours fiddling with the Puzzle Maker especially when most of my students don’t have access to Portal 2 outside of school. So, I required very little of my students with the level building portion of their exam grade and instead focused on their descriptions (there was a classic multiple choice component to the exam too, in case you were wondering).

And, in case you haven’t looked recently, the media mentions page has been updated. I just added the IT Babble podcast at the top. They’ve got a quick segment about Portal 2 and education. While I don’t get a mention by name, they do a decent job of describing of how my kids have been using Portal 2 (starting with a bad description around 13:00 but a much better description coming in around 19:25). Being discussed on a podcast is definitely a pretty cool first, though hearing the way they describe what I’ve been doing (especially around 15:00 in the podcast) is probably a good impetus to make a few quick introductory videos about everything Portal 2 and education for the general public.

Tagged , , , , , , ,
03/02/2013
3 Comments
News/Updates

is portal 2 a useful teaching tool? part 2

If you missed it, make sure you check out the first part in this series on Portal 2’s classroom impact: Student Interest.

Let’s talk Portal 2 from the teacher’s perspective. As a physics teacher, can I recommend Portal 2 to other teachers? Did I enjoy teaching with Portal 2?

Once again, the short answer is yes. Teaching with Portal 2 was awesome. But, of course, there are a few caveats. Like any other tool, it has advantages and drawbacks.

Issues

Teaching with technology is hard. Any teacher endeavoring to teach with a complex game like Portal 2 should expect to run into some significant technological hurdles. Installation in and of itself almost proved insurmountable for me. Not only did I need access to the right computer hardware, I had to request special modifications to my school’s network for Steam. In fact, I pressed the administration at my previous school for the entire 2011-2012 school year and still failed to ever install Portal on a single computer in the school. While the administration was more than helpful, we ran into a tangled bureaucratic mess in the district office when we requested that network ports be opened for Steam.

It wasn’t until I started working at my current position in a charter school, where we have much more control over our resources, that all of the technological pieces fell into place.

After getting Portal 2 installed, I still ran into problems. There was the issue of figuring out a fast way of installing it on 30 laptops using the least bandwidth possible (solved using a thumbdrive and two 90 minute planning periods of furious work). Then, on the first day of Portal 2 labs, my students ran into the NO STEAM issue, which I only knew how to solve because I happened to have seen the same error a few days earlier on my own computer.

Then there were the more mundane problems. Mice occasionally didn’t work. Steam wouldn’t open sometimes. Students claimed their levels periodically disappeared (they didn’t actually disappear). Random crashes. Laptops froze. Students sometimes didn’t know what they were doing and messed things up. All of the litany of issues that can occur when you’re running a complex game showed up. In the early days of Portal 2 labs, I spent almost as much time troubleshooting as I did actually teaching physics.

Advantages

I can’t understate how much fun it is to give students a sandbox world that follows the laws of physics. I felt, and I think my students would agree, that the freedom that Portal 2 affords arguably makes it one of the most important developments in the physics classroom. The freedom of the Puzzle Maker for physics students is akin to the freedom of a pen and a pad of paper for English students. They have agency and ability to mold a world to their specifications, analyze it, share it and ultimately learn in a way that no other tool can match. I love how quickly students can take a level from conception to playtesting in just a few minutes and then produce a data set by the end of class. It’s like being able to set my students loose in the Matrix for a class period.

So, yes, Portal 2 is awesome for educators. Just be prepared to solve some tech problems.

Tagged , , , ,
26/06/2012
4 Comments
Physics Demonstrations Video

the ideal gas law

Portal 2 can help students study more than just mechanics.

Thanks again to Yasser Malaika from Valve for sharing this awesome demonstration of the ideal gas law made using the Puzzle Maker. If you watched the Games for Change presentation last week, this should look pretty familiar (see 22:30).

There’s a lot more to explore with this concept. Expect to see more of it in the future.

Tagged , ,
%d bloggers like this: