Knowledge Formation and Inter-Game Transfer With Classical and Quantum Physics

TL;DR

This paper introduces Potential Penguin, a game designed to teach classical physics concepts like kinetic and potential energy through interactive landscape manipulation, and explores its potential to enhance understanding of quantum physics in related games.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel educational game that visualizes energy concepts and investigates its effectiveness in improving physics understanding and transfer to quantum physics applications.

Findings

Potential Penguin enhances understanding of energy concepts.

Visualization of energies correlates with improved physics intuition.

Transfer of knowledge to quantum physics is promising.

Abstract

In order to facilitate an intuitive understanding of classical physics concepts we have developed Potential Penguin - a game where players manipulate the landscape around a sliding penguin in order to control its movement. The learning goal of Potential Penguin is to familiarize players with kinetic energy and potential energy - the energies associated with movement and position in the landscape respectively. The game levels introduce the concepts one by one, as players are tasked with sliding the penguin through a landscape towards a specific location, while keeping the velocity under control. When the player manipulates the landscape, the potential energy of the penguin is changed, which determines the penguin's movement. To build a strong connection between theory and game the analytical expressions for kinetic and potential energy are displayed during play with font sizes continually growing and shrinking according to changes in each energy type. With Potential Penguin we hope to study whether visualizing the amount of kinetic and potential energy through visible mathematical expressions generates a connection between the intuitive actions taken in the game and the underlying physics concepts. The knowledge about kinetic and potential energy gained with Potential Penguin can also be used to understand most of the physics behind the citizen science game Quantum Moves, which has the goal of building a working quantum computer. The two games share the principle of the core interaction - manipulating the potential-energy landscape. We aim to investigate whether a proficiency and understanding of Potential Penguin predicts a better performance in Quantum Moves and a deeper understanding of the quantum physics behind that game.