The Kessel Run - A Gamification of Visual, Spatial, and Computational Thinking

Abstract

Technology can be both a bane and a boon to education. Social media apps and digital games offer rich and highly stimulating forms of engagement outside of the classroom. This level of stimulus has created challenges for traditional educational paradigms and approaches. A promising response is for educators to embrace technology through interactive apps and gamification. This workshop provides hands-on engagement with a collection of freely-available interactive web apps that focus on the development of visual, spatial, and computational thinking. The workshop concludes with participants playing a third-person Unity game in which the (interactive) standalone web apps presented in the workshop have been embedded. The game, inspired by Han Solo's Kessel run, involves a trek across a sequence of platforms located in a galaxy far far away. Teleportation from one platform to the next is enabled by correctly completing the activity contained in the embedded (and interactive) web apps and then having the player walk through a portal. The player game score is calculated based on the speed and accuracy of their engagement with the exercises present.