She pointed out that the team worked with teachers to ensure the game and lessons would fit into the classroom. Hott added that teachers were a central part of their planning as well. Rather than try to explain them, you may want to see what it looks like in the game through this video:īut the scientists and developers were not the only people in the room, according to the team building the project. So the team of designers began working with CalTech and Google to develop those three core ideas of quantum physics into Minecraft game elements. “What we did want is for them to have an intuitive understanding of observational dependency, of superposition, of entanglement so that if they were to encounter these words or concepts later in life, you know, they have a gut feeling for how it works.”
“We did not want the math and the hard physics involved to be the end goal,” Levin said. “If you wanted to introduce kids to some of the core concepts in an area like quantum mechanics why not meet them at the place where they are already at? … Minecraft as a commercial game is already hugely popular with kids in that middle school age group,” Alspach said.Īccording to Teacher Gaming’s Joel Levin, who blogs and tweets as the Minecraft Teacher, the next part of the process was deciding what exactly they wanted the students to take away from the game. The first step of the project came when they considered how best to do it.
The team knew they wanted to break down the ideas behind quantum mechanics to make them more understandable to younger students. “Today’s young people – kids who are at the middle school age – are going to be the generation of folks who are going to have to engage with the next generation of transformative technology that comes out there and certainly quantum computing … is one of those areas and one that they have focused on,” he said. QCraft is the result of a collaboration between Google, E-Line Media, Teacher Gaming and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech, but according to E-Line’s General Manager Brian Alspach, the genesis of the project came from Google’s interest in STEM education. In the game, it felt very fun and no one was thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is too hard,’” Katya Hott, a learning content producer at E-Line Media, said. “That is a real principle of quantum mechanics. The only way to find it is to view the canyon from the correct angle - or to understand the idea of “observational dependency.” In one of the lessons in the curriculum, for example, players have to find a bridge over an impossibly deep chasm.
QUANTUM LEAP GAME MOD
This week, a team of collaborators released an update to qCraft, a Minecraft mod and curriculum that hopes to teach middle school students some of the core principles of this cutting edge science. It’s a tough concept for most people to wrap their head around. In quantum physics the way in which an object or particle is observed can fundamentally change what that object or particle is.
QCraft aims to use the engagement of Minecraft to get kids excited about quantum physics.
0 kommentar(er)
