I agree that computer games swallow student's time and interest. So how
can we use this to our advantage to teach physics? If students will
play games for hours, then let's create some games that will teach them
physics along the way. In games like Civilization, students have to
build a society by managing natural resources, inventing, appropriating
money to various things, etc. Why not have a "Scientific Civilization"
where students build ideas, test their ideas, invent new technology
based on those ideas, etc?
The problem with many of the action games is that they are built for
speed and ease of use, not for physical correctness. You may remember
the asteroids game, for example. In that game, your space ship has two
thrusters, one to rotate the ship and one to accelerate the ship. It
shoots asteroids and must keep from being hit by one. One nice aspect
of the game as that students learn something about Newton's first law
and Newton's second law: (1) when the thruster stops firing, the space
ship maintains a constant velocity in the direction it was moving when
the engine stopped firing; (2) the space ship does not move in the
direction of the thrust but rather the velocity changes in the
direction of the thrust (this is a nice application for showing 2-D
motion).
The translational motion of the space ship is physically correct. What
I don't like about this game is that the rotational motion is
incorrect. That is, you rotate at a constant speed and when you stop
the thruster, the ship stops rotating! It violates Newton's laws for
rotational motion!
My best physics student is also an expert Java programmer, writing
games for http://gamelizard.com/ and playing games for hours each day.
He is hands-down my BEST student. He had written a game similar to
asteroids (but modernized of course). When I mentioned my gripe about
the "unphysicalness" of asteroids, he added correct rotational motion
to the spaceship in his game. However, he took it out because it made
the game so much more difficult to play.
As another side note, I use Matter & Interactions and for approximately
half of our labs, students write vpython programs. Last week, students
were supposed to write a program that modeled the motion of an electron
in a uniform electric field. They were then supposed to modify the
program to place charged objects at various locations and model the
motion of the electron in that field. Well, I told this student that he
should instead write "Electric Field Hockey" (original program by Ruth
Chabay, written in CT). He asked to do it in Java, and I agreed. Within
2 hours, he had a working version of Electric Field Hockey in Java.
I might add that Electric Field Hockey and Graphs and Tracks (by
Physics Academic Software) are probably the best instructional physics
games that I'm familiar with.