Critical Mass, développé par Purdue University, est un vrai jeu vidéo, uniquement dédié aux sciences, avec un graphique sophistiqué, une narration complexe ; du moins, c’est ce qu’on retient en lisant sa description sur le site web et en regardant petite vidéo mise à disposition. Le but : apprendre la chimie en jouant.
You are deep underground in a lab that once housed some of the finest minds in chemistry. But robots directed by a crackbrained artificial intelligence have taken it over and plan to use its equipment to destroy the world! After freezing an evil robot with your handy wrist-mounted hot-and-cold gun, you reach the Haber-Bosch room. And now you must correctly synthesize ammonia or die. “Your students are playing video games,” Gabriela Weaver told a group of chemistry teachers at the American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, on 29 March. “They are playing them more and more hours a day. They are probably playing them in your class.” If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Weaver, an associate professor of chemistry at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, is building a computer game about the subject - she hopes her prototype will be as appealing to students as the blockbuster games coming out of companies like Electronic Arts (EA).
(Chemistry: the video game Will Critical Mass woo students to the field? Emma Marris. News nature. Published online: 31 March 2006)
Weaver and Morales began the project by studying students playing various popular commercial video games. “Our goal was to understand the aspects of video games that make them both engaging and self-learning environments,” Weaver said. “We would like to see if we can use those characteristics of commercial video games to create a game that has the same level of engagement and interest for students but includes chemistry concepts as some of the story line.” The game, which is aimed at late-high-school and early-college students, isn’t intended to replace any formal chemistry education, Weaver noted. “Rather, we’re hoping that if we can create this type of a game and it has any kind of popular appeal, then it can serve to lower chemistry anxiety among potential students and set the stage for students to have a more open-minded approach to their chemistry classes and their own abilities to do chemistry.” Brewing up ammonia doesn’t sound too exciting, but it’s only a small part of the story line. The ammonia is needed to make fertilizer for plants that provide much of the oxygen for the underground facility in which the game takes place. The game player can adopt the persona of one of three humanoid characters: a male “bruiser,” who provides muscle power; a female “mechanic,” who can take things apart and reassemble them; or a gender-neutral “psychic,” who can read minds and can also tell what has happened recently in a room. Human scientists in the facility awake the player’s chosen humanoid character from cryogenic sleep “because something has gone terribly wrong,” Weaver said. The facility was formerly used for manufacturing chemicals with a beneficial purpose. But the robots that carry out the manufacturing process have gone over to the “dark side,” taken over the facility, and are now threatening the entire planet by manufacturing a different-and dangerous-product. The game designers haven’t decided yet what the beneficial and dangerous products will be, though they will be chemical in nature. Illustration by Eugene Elkin HELPING HANDS Characters in the game include this robot, which is protected from lab hazards by an impermeable coating. The robots are trying to get rid of the humans in part by damaging the life-support systems in the underground facility. The game revolves around the humans’ attempts to fix the life-support systems, get the robots back on their side, and stop them from destroying the planet. Game players help the scientists and can protect themselves from the robots with nonlethal stun guns. Chemistry appears in the story as both a force for good and an instrument of evil. “In order for a game to be engaging there needs to be a challenge, and the challenge usually includes some sort of danger,” Weaver said. “So if we want to keep the story line on chemistry, then we’re going to need to use chemistry both for creating the problem and for solving the problem.” So far, Weaver, Morales, and their students have plotted out one level of the game and written the code for one room in that level. Undergraduate volunteers are testing this segment of the game for playability and bugs. “We’re also testing it to see if students learn any chemistry from it and what their attitudes are about playing the game,” Weaver said. “People who see the game think it’s really neat, for the most part. They seem to enjoy it.”
(Video Game Aims To Engage Students Working chemistry into a dramatic story line is intended to ease anxiety about learning the science Sophie L. Rovner APRIL 10, 2006 VOLUME 84, NUMBER 15 PP. 76-77 ACS MEETING NEWS )