Calculus Gets Gamified at Texas A&M
With so many students being avid gamers, providing coursework within video games offers a chance to make learning more relevant and show how the concepts being studied can be applied outside the classroom. To that end, Texas A&M University, College Station, gave researchers a $100,000 grant to commercialize 3-D video games in calculus and art history/appreciation as supplements to standard coursework. The games are offered by Triseum LLC , a company that grew from the Texas A&M Department of Visualization’s Learning Interactive Visualization Experience (LIVE) Lab . Triseum’s CEO is also founder and director of the LIVE Lab and an assistant professor teaching game design and development at the university. In Variant: Limits, players work to save a fictional planet from imminent destruction by assisting the game’s protagonist in solving a series of increasingly complex calculus problems. Prompts within the game allow students to refresh themselves on theory or firm up the concept...