Learning Science in a video game

River City is a multi-user virtual environment, based in ActiveWorlds … Students make avatars, talk to citizens in the world (some are dumb AIs, but they can be puppetted by the teacher), and have a workspace in which they can perform water quality tests and other diagnostics, record the results, and create and test hypotheses. The software design includes the ability to record what steps students take, in what order, how often they repeat content lessons or experimental steps, and other aspects of their approach to solving the problem.

It’s not the first time a game has taught science skills, but this time it’s deliberate. I really like how you have the opportunity of creating a mysterious illness for the students to investigate, and this leaves open the possibility of it not being a real one. So instead of the the situation where someone could simply apply memorization to the problem and say, “Oh, the symptoms are X, Y and Z, but not A or B? It’s the plague. Fleas carried by the rats,” you have a number of perturbations which might not correspond to any real-life disease, and which means some actual problem-solving skills are in play. Which is tough(er) to do in physics.