Client: Advantage West Midlands
Partners: The University of Birmingham
Brief: Working with the West Midlands region’s Interactive Digital Media project the company proposed the development of a serious game concept demonstrator to show how games-based technology could be applied for serious purposes in this case the teaching of Newton’s Laws of Motion to secondary school physics students.
Solution: Taking advantage of the real-world physics capability of computer games development tools, Kliper 2.0 was developed based on Russia’s Kliper space vehicle designed to be a replacement for the Soyuz spacecraft.
Working closely with Professor Robert J. Stone of the University of Birmingham and with Professor Valentin Shukshunov, president of The International Higher Education Academy of Sciences and Professor Peter Panfilov, from the Moscow State Institute of Electronics and Mathematics a model of the Kliper spacecraft was created within a three dimensional space environment.
Users of the physics simulation were then able to take control of the spacecraft and attempt to dock it with the International Space Station in a series of exercises which required them to understand Newton’s Laws of Motion to achieve a successful docking.
Throughout the development process links were made with both teachers and pupils at local schools in order to ensure the embedded learning aligned with the National Curriculum and to test the demonstrator.
Outcomes: The demonstrator went a long way to achieving its primary objectives i.e. building a solution that illustrated real-world physics in action and to which pupils positively responded in their appreciation and better understanding of mathematical and physics concepts.
As a result of the demonstrator activity the development partnership is being progressed to explore future developments of Kliper 2.0 and other interactive learning solutions.
Links: Kliper 2.0: Momentum Video – Kliper 2.0: Thrust Video – Birmingham Post Article