Research Teacher Wants To Integrate PORTAL 2 Into Our Class?

[TEKABecca114]

My Research professor wants to somehow bring PORTAL 2 into the class and he wants me to help. The problem is that I have no idea how a physics-based puzzle game could teach research. He mostly just wants an excuse to play PORTAL 2 in class. Any ideas?

[tmwfte]

Steam has an education programme: Try Here.

[Portalnerd]

I wish we could play portal 2 in school

[TEKABecca114]

tmwfte の投稿を引用：

Steam has an education programme: Try Here.

I see what you're getting at, but this isn't a physics class. This is just a class that teaches how to research properly.

[GamesAndInk]

Well, the research itself would be hard to teach, but motivating and evaluating that research could be done with Portal.

For instance, you could have a puzzle which is only solvable if you find a certain fact. I don't know how this would be accomplished--multiple choice? Anyway, the idea would be that completing the puzzle would be the motivation, not the method, of teaching the course.

HOWEVER. There is another alternative. You see, Portal 2 is absolutely FILLED with historical references. Practically every other line is a reference to something, and there are little Easter Eggs (like the character hiding in the portrait of Cave and Caroline) everywhere. Properly researching THOSE would be an interesting task. The problem there is that all of that info is already available on the Half-Life wiki, but that would be a possibility.

Forming a paper out of it would also be an interesting challenge. For instance, a screenshot would be a secondary source of that hidden character--the primary source would be extracting the image file out of the Source engine. The students would have to do that to properly identify the source for writing the bibliography of the paper. And of course, you would have to find references in a real world library to the actual hidden character, which would involve using library reference databases and physically searching the stacks.

I'm not really sure what this class teaches, but that sort of thing would seem to work.

Wheatley says at one point "Let there be light." That could be the simple starting point of researching what the name and real-world location of the oldest surviving scroll that contains that line is, and if possible what the Hebrew (or Greek or whatever) words are.

There's also a song in there commonly referred to as "The Turret Wife Serenade". That one is absolutely RIPE with research potential. Find out the original name of the song (and the primary source for what that original name is--also involves diving through Source files), look up the meanings of that original name, relate it to the Portal story, and so on. (It relates to the sordid English ballad Lamkin, because the original name was Ode to Lamkin)

Unlike a physics based class, where you can do the entire class in Portal (calculate out a given amount of force required to launch a weighted ball through a hoop, then test your calculations in real time), a research class would use Portal more as a jumping off point. Rather than have the topic of research be some old guy, or some moldy book, have it be the students researching the origin of the concepts in the scene where GLaDOS says 'this sentence is false' at Wheatley, and all of the Frankenturrets catch on fire but Wheatley doesn't get it.

[bermuda]

Ya it has LOADS of historical references. And hidden easter eggs. With easter eggs it makes it more challenging