Live and let learn

After the TALO Swap/meet the other week, we got talking in our Web Design class about the possibility of using a First-person shooter to learn Web Design. How would it work? How could people learn about Web Design while running around shooting people?

It just so happened that one of the members of our class, Edward Smith, has a bit of a background in gaming and was really excited about the idea. A few weeks later, he released the first version of Silence of the Terminals! (SOTT for short.)

The idea that Edward went with is a little different to other FPS educational ideas (such as Jean-Claude’s excellent work with his Chemistry classes). He decided to create a classic “Capture the flag” type game with two teams - read and blue - but with a small difference… Each team has to venture from their base to a village and enter a building where they “hack” a computer (simply bump into it). At this point, the computer asks them a simple answer question (in our case, related to Web design), if they get the question right, they’re given a disk to take back to their base. If they manage to get the disk back to their base, then they score 5 points! All this takes place while you’re being attacked by members of the opposing team!

The great thing about Edward’s design is that you can change the questions to suite any topic you like! (Edward’s started a wikispace for Silence of the Terminals where questions can be developed collaboratively). So the game can be rejigged to work with Chemistry questions, or Architecture questions or Spelling questions! The game is based on the Torque 3D engine, which can be downloaded and used for free on Windows or Linux (although a license is required if you want to do serious development work that requires the source-code for the Torque 3D engine).

Five of us had a game yesterday and it was excellent fun, we had to use teamwork to achieve our goal, as well as demonstrate some knowledge of HTML and CSS… Unreal! There are some issues, such as the fact that not everybody likes running around as an Orc with a rocket-launcher and shooting people… One idea we came up with is to allow people to choose the visualisation of their game. For example, while playing the exact same game, some players could have the game visualised as fairies playing spotto (with a dolphin torch instead of the shot-gun, and a small laser spotter instead of the sniper rifle) - same game, different visualisation! But I’m not sure whether this is feasible or not yet… or worth the amount of development time it would require.

You can download the current release from Edward’s blog (or check Edward’s blog for the latest release). Unreal work Edward!