SuperCharged! Electromagnetism Energized

You enter a physics classroom. In front of you stands a 60-something professor, droning monotonously. Looking down, you notice a comic book that someone has slipped into your papers. Hmmm. You pick it up, inquisitively. On the back, you notice a pair of flimsy cardboard 3D glasses. You look from side-to-side, trickily.….

Before you even realize what happened, you’re sucked into a surrealist world of pulsating lights and sounds. You spin to the left and bank off of an invisible wall, narrowly missing a collision with a powerful magnetic field. Pulsing lights fly by you as you navigate a small blue glowing pod through a drippy, surrealist space populated by flashing lights, humming sounds, and small furry creatures, called Fizzgigs.

As it turns out, Fizzgigs are native to this surrealist electric space. They have been enslaved by your evil professor, and are being enslaved to help the professor in his evil plots. You quickly realize that these cute, but occasionally annoying creatures may be your biggest hope for getting out of here alive. While they cannot drive your pod (they can’t reach the pedals), they have grown up in this counter-intuitive world of electric and magnetic interactions. Together, perhaps you can save them.

SuperCharged! is an action racing game that is designed to give players an intuitive understanding for introductory E&M reactions. Research in teaching Electromagnetism has shown that students have a very difficult time understanding how electromagnetic forces interact. The laws governing electromagnetic forces, such as Maxwell’s laws are very counter-intuitive, and students have little real frame of references for understanding how these forces interact. John Belcher, who teaches Electromagnetism at MIT explains how even when students do pass tests showing that they’ve "mastered" Electromagnetism, they frequently lack any deep understanding of how these forces interact.

Earlier projects, such as Science Space, used headset VR displays to teach these same principles. The advent of 3D gaming technologies makes this kind of 3D immersive experience feasible on a $99 PlayStation. Working with John Belcher, we’ve designed a 3D interactive racing game where players learn how electromagnetic forces interact by placing them so that they are propelled through space. Players are sent through wires, propelled through electromagnetic fields, and even forced to navigate through a level after being blindfolded by the evil professor. Through playing SuperCharged!, players may not learn electromagnetic formulas, but they will develop an intuitive sense for how electromagnetic interactions work that will serve them as they learn these formulas in a through extended study.

Copyright 2002, MIT.