Photo Credit: Don via Compfight

We’ve seen the future of physics education, and it’s fun. Singularity Hub writes:

Valve recently launched a free initiative called Teach With Portals that aims to help teachers use the game Portal 2 (click here for a review) to engage students in learning STEM and critical thinking. By converting its level-building software, Hammer Editor, into a much easier to use interface called Puzzle Maker, Valve has made it possible for anyone to design challenging Portal rooms. The Teach With Portals website also offers community-submitted lesson plans (here’s an example of a harmonic oscillator) that utilize the game and align with national STEM standards so teachers can directly incorporate them into their curriculum. Teachers can sign up for the ‘Steam for Schools‘ beta program, which offers a limited version of the popular Steam gaming platform that hosts the free version of Portal 2 and the Puzzle Maker.

A teacher in Tennessee even put up videos so other educators could see how a lesson plan could come together. Students could just watch the video and get the jist, but they’d miss out in the biggest educational component to interact and build the variables. We particularly like how the teacher starts with a plain text question — to show the transition to the immersive video game environment so students see the correlation.