After GameCyte discovered last week that NASA’s upcoming massively multiplayer game was still on solid financial footing, we didn’t expect to hear word from NASA Learning Technologies until mid-June, the deadline for interested developers to submit their game proposals. Thankfully, we were wrong; and now GameSpot has an excellent interview with project manager Daniel Laughlin, which provides a little more insight into what the game might become.
When one thinks about government-funded titles, America’s Army tends to spring to mind, and while that military sim’s budget and target audience are far different, it’s easy to imagine the NASA MMO as a similar recruiting tool; a way to spur interest in America’s once-romanticized space program. But Laughlin explains that what NASA is really looking for is an educated workforce:
GS: I’m seeing the term “STEM discipline” tossed about in your request for proposal (RFP) as your target audience for the game. Could you explain what that term means?
DL: That’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Basically, most people just call it “sciences,” or some people call it “the sciences,” and engineers like to call it all “engineering.” It’s those fields of technical endeavor where NASA particularly needs a workforce that is highly literate and skilled in those, whether we’re talking about engineering or aeronautics involved in rocket science or we’re looking at planetary biology or planetary geology, we’re looking at a very technically literate workforce that NASA needs, and the news overall for the country is that our STEM literate workforce is shrinking as we get fewer and fewer students going into those educational areas and fewer of them graduating with degrees from those areas.
When asked why NASA isn’t pursuing a console title instead, Laughlin provided a variety of reasons — but most intriguing is the idea that an online community will help engineers develop teamwork:
You get a lot of kids going into engineering school, for instance, then they go to enormous seminar classes with 300 other people, because engineer schools have decided that the way to see if you’re a good engineer is to throw you into a big pot, turn up the heat, and see who can survive on their own. And a lot of kids drop out at that level.
I expect the community that develops around a game that supports STEM is going to act as a support unit also for those kids who are up to their eyeballs in boiling water trying to survive on their own, that they’ll now have a support network to help them get through and reach the level where they get to become engineers. I personally don’t think that being able to survive on your own is particularly a technique that makes you a good engineer, it just helps you survive the first year of engineering school.
But the game has to be fun, not just educational, because NASA isn’t envisioning the game as required coursework — but rather an extracurricular experience.
The reality is that any given kid has 15 times more leisure time than they’ve got time spent on any one subject in school. So the idea would be to capture some of that time that we know kids and adults are spending in games and on recreational activities. And that’s one of the reasons that it’s got to be a fun game, something that you’d sit down and say, “I want to play this game, and any education that happens is a bonus, because the game is fun and it’s useful.” So if we just shoehorned it into classrooms, we’d miss the real power of using games.
We’re skeptical that students would embrace edutainment without at least some sort of course credit, but NASA is serious about making this work; and so we’ll eagerly bring you news of the official proposals next month.
Tags: America's Army, Daniel Laughlin, edutainment, mmo, NASA
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