Interactive gaming for lessons

                An interesting subject matter for many of my students is space.   It’s a question that come up often (are we going to talk about space?) and because of the time limitations of the year and the vast amount of content we cover there is little time to cover this topic or really rather any topic the students might want to learn about that is outside of our curriculum.                 Being a life science teacher there is little room for really anything that is not related to the human body, evolution or ecology as these are major subject point and take up many units during our year.   However, if I was able to teach a subject that I know might interest my students I would choose space.

                A program I found on the internet that combines space and elements of physics is called: http://sciencenetlinks.com/interactives/gravity.html   it’s a simulation that allows students to adjust thrust and angle to try and meet goals of orbiting a rocket around different objects in space (i.e. the Earth, moon etc. ).  While I have seen many programs like this one( often games for students),  this one differs by the fact that the game is effected by gravitational pull of the various planets you attempt to orbit.  This makes it hard to get things right on the first try and there is a help button that goes along by explaining how gravity works.  The online interaction as well as entering data (angle and thrust) is a great way to get students comfortable and familiar with running computer programs that rely on numbers.

                If I were to use something like this in the classroom I would obviously pair it with short answer questions like” how does thrust/ angle affect trajectory?” or “how does gravity differ on earth or the moon?”.   To tie into stem careers and deeper learning I would most likely try to find a short video clips about various gravitational pulls of planets.

                I suppose my main point is that interactive games can offer a lot of science insight as well.   Recently a new Angry Birds Space game came out and it is similar to this computer program.  Using sling shots , gravity and a target students can learn about momentum , kinetic vs potential energy and even things like friction.  As far as I know this program is only available on cell phones and this would become an issue when trying to use it in the classroom.