Note: interactive material from the Science Simulation Lab can be found in our Showcase section.


For a week in October 2002 a secluded Jacobean farmhouse in Bore Place, Kent became something of a hothouse. In pursuit of a range of science simulation tools for the betterment of science education, a cross-disciplinary group of 20 educators and multimedia folk descended on these headquarters of the Performing Arts Labs (PAL) to explore the potential for new media in science.

PAL works through action-based research and development, and residential workshops at Bore Place to date have covered screen- and play-writing, choreography and architecture, as well as interactive media. Futurelab developed the Science Simulation Lab concept and sponsored the event. Participants were specially invited to attend, and included Tony Sherborne, Head of Development of resources for Science Year; Roy Hawkey, Head of Learning at the Natural History Museum; graphic artists Lise Autogene and Josh Portway; Dennis Liu, the Director of the Howard Hughes Medical Centre in the USA; and Steve Mesure, the founder of the Floating Point Science Theatre.


Aims of the Lab

Far from being simply an exercise in experimental, digital multimedia, the Science Simulation Lab sought to address some fundamental issues for the future of science education in the UK and beyond. With science viewed as dull by many children according even to recent government publications¹ (a reflection more on curricular limitations than teaching staff), the Lab's participants investigated some of the most important scientific subjects for children, areas that teachers find particularly difficult to teach, and areas in which simulations provide the best method for visualising, exploring, and making relevant a range of scientific phenomena.

In total, ten concepts were developed, some through to paper prototype and storyboarding stage, others through to digital mock-up and even working prototypes. Working collaboratively in mixed teams of four, participants were inspired by Kurt Schmucker's Taxonomy of Simulation Software², and aimed to create or recreate phenomena, environments or experiences; provide opportunities for understanding; offer interactive steering of simulation; develop solid grounding in consistent models of theory; and to build in unpredictability or variable outcomes depending on user input.

Director of the Simulation Lab, Fabrice Floren, explained that, "participants shared a passion for projects that invite learners to ask questions and find their own answers, rather than forcing pre-determined answers on them. This understanding made it easier to converge on solutions in support of that pedagogical approach." Groups of children from local schools also visited the Lab, and were involved closely in critiquing, commenting on and expanding the potential of the various teams' ideas and concepts.


Projects at the Lab

With these aims, methodologies and understandings, participants worked on projects based around online multiplayer environments, 3D adventure games, data visualisation tools, resource management activities, and simulation construction kits, also considering technologies such as wireless connectivity and handheld computing, as well as videogame consoles. Blended approaches too were encouraged.

The videogame approach proved fruitful for several projects. Cell Wars is envisaged as an immersive warfare game along the lines of Xbox hit Halo - only in this case the battleground is the human body, and the weapons based on actual attack-defence mechanisms of the immune system. Project member Dennis Liu stated that the game was inspired by existing scientific imagery: "there are stunning visuals in biology, so we realised all that beautiful, amazing stuff is game-worthy even as it is." Conceived as a multiplayer environment open via the web 24 hours a day, Cell Wars is intended to attract gamers to inquire about how cells work, and how immunology, genetics and bio-informatics all interact.

A related project idea, The Life Game, also emerged from work on the Cell Wars concept. Proposed as a computer game more in the vein of SimCity or The Sims, players would build and control microscopic eco-systems, simulating how microscopic organisms compete, survive and evolve. With points awarded according to how successful players' eco-systems become, the game would again be multiplayer in approach and, like SimCity, would benefit from players taking a collaborative approach, predicting outcomes and discussing the issues at hand before committing to action.

Perhaps the most openly videogame-like of the concepts developed at the Lab was Stranded on Mars. A role-playing game fashioned on Tomb Raider or its contemporaries, players would control characters in the game to work out science puzzles embedded in the narrative. Advancement through the game depends therefore on the learners' reactions to challenges based on authentic science. Team lead Ilan Chabay said, "the idea is to give kids the chance to experiment with situations. in the virtual world. that they can't really do."

A videogame aesthetic informs the Size Matters project too. A simulation of how size and scale and the natural environment working together affect shape and form, it features a Size-o-Meter allowing players to manipulate the size of objects, from insects to populations, and witness the effects that re-scaling causes. "We've discovered great ranges of scale," project leader Andrew Lovelock said. "Things change in the larger realms or the smaller realms. The rules are different." Size Matters explores these rules. With a working demo of a hamster being scaled to the size of a mountain, Size Matters is to be demonstrated in At-Bristol, the South West's principal science exhibition centre, in Spring 2003.

Sharing a similar playfulness, Smackarooni is a variation on 8-ball pool illustrated with cartoon-style graphics to make the physics of properties and matter inviting and fun. Designed for multiplayer interaction on wireless games devices, next-generation mobile phones, PC or TV set-top box, the game requires players to set up chain reactions between objects with varying properties in order to 'sink' balls into the relevant pockets. With the Smackarooni engine already developed, it is envisaged that the game could be especially applicable for mobile phone delivery, which is fast becoming the medium of choice for young people.

A more wildly experimental take on mobile computing forms the basis of CARAMEL, Constructing Augmented Reality And Mobile E-Learning. Wearing 'magic glasses' (goggles envisaged as somewhat akin to those used in early 90s virtual reality projects), users would be able to overlay their physical view with computerised images of the same view. Lab director Fabrice Floren said, "when you switch them on, you can see things from the past, from deep inside the landscape, that you wouldn't normally be able to see." Learners would then be able to add data and resources to their real-world view, and communicate across wireless networks with peers. Although a fully-realised CARAMEL would require a huge research and development phase, it is possible in the shorter-term that a location-based peer-to-peer information-sharing system could be developed using current PDA technology rather than 'magic glasses'.

Open Earth is planned as a simple mark-up language for web browsers, allowing users to publish and compare temporally and geographically located information on the internet. By overlaying data from different sources, Open Earth will provide the opportunity to examine patterns and relationships between various phenomena. One example is having news stories tagged to a virtual globe so that hotspots across time phases and geographical locations can be traced. "There are all sorts of parallels to be made," project leader Josh Portway said, "and science is all about being able to see patterns."

Using the same markup language, Most Blue Skies is intended as a more visual and poetic approach to science. Users would combine weather data, atmospheric research and environmental monitoring systems, integrated over the web, to identify the most blue skies in the world at any one time as stimulation for creative response.

Virtual model-building underpins the last two of the projects investigated at the Lab. Sensodrama allows children to build representational models of the world as they perceive it, capturing real world data such as light, sound, temperature and so on. One example is a child representing her heartbeat as a teddy bear that grows larger and smaller based on her pulse data. Sensodrama promotes the creative exploration of scientific data that does not impose on children pre-determined representational methods.

SimScope, on the other hand is an attempt to allow students to model empirical scientific phenomena. The holy grail of science simulation is a way of modelling the real world, and then being able to manipulate it and understand the connections between a plethora of environments and objects. Visualising and conveying information is always going to be incredibly difficult. SimScope would approach the issue by presenting, at the first level, data-rich 3D simulation templates in which simplified data can be manipulated, and it is envisaged that increasing complexity could be built in to simulate rich interdependencies in a playful way.


Learning from the Lab

While all of the projects and ideas pursued at the Science Simulation Lab have at their core the issue of reinforcing scientific inquiry and stimulating interest in all of the sciences, each approach emphasises quite distinct ways of thinking around the subject. Indeed, input from the children who visited the Lab helped to shape further the focus of the projects, and the participants to understand better how their target audience respond to the challenges of simulations.

Some of the projects, for instance, emphasised children's creative responses to science, drawing on theories of users as co-designers engaging with the technology to their own ends. Sensodrama and Most Blue Skies, for instance, depend on the user collecting data and then using it in unusual and creative ways to make it 'make sense' to them and to their perception of the world surrounding them.

On the other hand, Cell Wars, Size Matters, Smackarooni, Life Game and Stranded on Mars are attempts to marry science to both the games aesthetic and to make it in a sense 'playable' or exploratory, mimicking investigations of scenarios not physically possible without the benefit of fantastic miniaturisation machines or space craft.

Open Earth, CARAMEL and SimScope are perhaps the most pragmatic of the lot, emphasising the collection, publication and manipulation of real world science to better understand the complex relationships between things, objects and environments.

Despite these differences, and indeed the differences in proposed delivery platforms, the majority of the project teams had thought through ways of making their concepts 'multiplayer', or collaborative, in nature, requiring cooperation or competition between players to fully comprehend the simulations and to inform their input to them. The social aspect of playing mainstream, entertainment videogames is incredibly important to children, who perceive games a social activity much as earlier generations played outside or with toys together.

Collaboration allows children to express and discuss ideas, to perform evaluation in light of others' comments and to modify their approaches. Working with science simulations is a process in most cases of asking 'what if.?'; working together, children are more able to formulate predictions to those sorts of questions, to differ and argue, and then to test hypotheses before arriving at consensus.

Events such as the Science Simulation Lab demonstrate the tough creative thinking and experimentation involved in conceptualising applications for the future improvement of educational opportunities for children. Simulations of scientific phenomena have the ability to bring to life otherwise invisible or inaccessible study materials, and the levels of interactivity they present allow children to experience, hands-on, the strange and baffling world that surrounds them.


Notes:

1. Science Education from 14-19. House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee. Third Report of Session 2001-02, vol. 1.
2. Kurt Schmucker's A Taxonomy of Simulation Software
www.apple.com/education/LTReview/spring99/simulation/

Links:

Performing Arts Labs - www.pallabs.org


April 2003