A video game about electricity for teens

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a new video game that helps to build their understanding of the processes involved in electricity. The gameplay is a series of puzzles, and the main idea is to spark their interest in engineering and going to university respectively.

The researchers call the game an ideal way that allows them to explain what electricity is, as it visualizes the basic concepts and the connections that come with it.

This video game, Wired, is available completely free of charge. It demonstrates the basic mathematical concepts behind electricity. This amazing phenomenon affects humans on a daily basis, but teachers who teach about it often have difficulty because electricity is very abstract and difficult to visualize. In addition, it also requires practice, and lots of it, to master all the knowledge about it.

This led the researchers to choose a video game as the perfect tool to teach students the basic concepts of electricity. The gameplay is structured so that students sequentially complete tasks, each building on the previous ones. As a result, they progress from simpler concepts to more complex ones, gradually making all areas accessible to their understanding.

Diarmid Campbell, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Engineering, has spent almost twenty years in the games industry. He has designed games for PlayStation, Xbox and PC and now works as a senior lecturer at Cambridge, but continues to develop games, now with an educational purpose – to get more teenagers to want to go into engineering.

Players in Wired gain an intuitive understanding of circuits, switch logic, voltage, current and resistance.  This is not done in the same way as in classic textbooks, where these circuits are analyzed, but through solving problems that are offered in the game.

According to Campbell, a video game should be more interesting than lessons. That is, the task that went into the development of Wired was a difficult one – the game should be both educational and fun. Such gamification of educational processes is the future. And it’s not just about electricity.

The developers were based on the premise that people intuitively understand how things behave. That is, they have an understanding of many areas of physics before they learn about them more formally. For example, children throw a ball when they play, so when they learn about projectiles and Newton’s laws of motion, they have an intuition that helps them apply the equations.

But in the case of electricity, it’s more complicated: before Wired, it was impossible to play with it. The development has bridged this gap and given players an intuitive understanding of how electricity behaves, and helping them solve problems not normally encountered until A-level physics.  Wired is available now on Mac and Windows.

The material is supported by cricketbettingapps.com.in.