Before Shrek could storm the halls of the castle and before Mr. Incredible could save the next generation of Supers, teams of engineers were hard at work bringing these characters to life. Muscle by muscle, engineers literally built these heroes from the ground up, starting with wire-frame models.
By participating in the program, students learn about concepts in physics, develop self-confidence and presentation skills, and begin to see the world through the eyes of a problem-solving engineer. Once students play in the Digital Zoo, they won’t look at anything that stands or moves the same way again!
Game History
Prior to the development of Digital Zoo, we created a prototype game called Berta’s Tower, where we investigated the effectiveness of Sodaconstructor as a game engine. Twelve middle school students participated in two weekend-length games, engaging in engineering design projects that involved creating static and dynamic structures in the online simulator.
Next, we conducted an epistemography of BME 201, an undergraduate design course for sophomore biomedical engineering students. During the semester, students worked in teams to solve actual design problems posed by real clients, engaging in authentic engineering tasks. Our goal for this study was to investigate how these activity structures helped the budding engineers develop key engineering skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking.
Based on the results of the epistemography, we began developing Digital Zoo in earnest in late 2004. During the summer of 2005, middle school girls played a three-week version of the game. Results from this implementation of the game impacted the next iteration, an 80-hour version also played by middle school girls in the summer of 2006.
Since then, we have developed another version of the game intended for players at the elementary school level. In January 2007, twenty-three 4th and 5th grade students played the game, and their teachers were involved on the research team. Building off of this version, an engineering epistemic game called Digital Tots – intended for 2nd graders – is currently under development.
Game Engine
As mentioned above, Sodaconstructor was tested and chosen as the game engine for Digital Zoo. It is a virtual spring-mass modeling environment devised by a London based company called soda creative ltd. Thousands of people use this software and many of their creations can be found in the sodazoo. Future work on the Digital Zoo Game Engine will include building additional components that allow players to maintain online engineering design notebooks and interact with virtual and remote mentors during gameplay.
