Well, I found another game that is being used in school by a teacher to teach students about the stuff in our real world. This time Garry’s Mod is the game being used. For those of you who don’t know what this game is all about, It’s a 3D sandbox game that uses the source game engine to simulate a world/map. You can weld things together, make circuit like apparatuses, spawn virtual people, create stuff, and much more. In a previous article a similar thing happened but using a different game called Minecraft; you can read about that at this link: [ efplace.com ]

Garry’s Mod is similar to Minecraft with a few differences; one of these differences being that Minecraft simulates a BIG vast world being created by the game while allowing the user to change the world in many ways, whereas Garry’s Mod is limited to usually small user created maps that cannot be changed that much. Garry’s Mod has better tools for creating objects though; you can easily spawn two objects, weld them together, paint them, add thrusters, tie some rope to a item, and many other things.

In this instance, the teacher is using Garry’s Mod to help teach a group of students about the complex world of chemistry. He has even been nice enough to upload the videos he shows to the students to YouTube, for all our enjoyment. See this video that demonstrates some of the awesome teaching capabilities of the game:

I’ve always loved sandbox games, but never really thought about them being used in school; but now that these tools are being utilized in some school class rooms, it really makes me wonder why this hasn’t been done sooner. These games – or maybe I should call it a tool now – can offer much more interactivity while learning. Instead of just listening to a lecture with somewhat crude diagrams being drawn on the chalk/white board, professors can now create a virtual object in this gaming engine to represent, for example, a molecule that the teacher can virtually pick up, move around, and even allow the students, themselves, the opportunity to play around with the in-game representations of a certain molecule. This is certainly much more hands on learning then sitting in a chair listening; the best way to learn something seems to be when you can see and interact with an object.

The Future?

This makes me really excited for the future of learning. Imagine if this was being improved up to the level of being able to interact with these virtual sandbox games in the real world even more so then we can now; image being able to touch “virtual objects” with your hands and being able to mess around with these items. A person can then become a make-shift scientist without all the complex equipment and expensive materials. We could instead use all the virtual materials to mess around with the items in the game and all the community members can contribute their findings to each other through the internet; of course for the scientist part to work out well, we would need a game/engine to emulate our real world as close as possible – we are definitely nowhere near that now. But in the mean time we can get a bit more interactivity while learning about this awesome world around us all.