Educational Game for the Environment
Oliver Vlaytchev '13 came back to ACS to give the students a game to play – and thus gather valuable data for his thesis work at the Birmingham City University, UK.
Oliver is completing his Bachelor's program in Computer Games at BCU. For his thesis he invented and programmed a game that he describes as "an educational game for the environment." Its premise: the player builds an environment by a lake, planting trees and arranging greenery, cultivating crops, etc., and then "the humans" intrude and start building industry. The task for the player becomes one of maintaining balance to the environment.
And the educational part? The ACS students who participated in Oliver's sample took a test before playing the game, and then took it again afterwards. Oliver will analyze the two sets of results and if playing the game has improved the score by more than 30% he will conclude that playing the game has had an educational effect.
His own experience has taught him that a lot of the traditional methods of education foster anti-environmentalism. "Students are still taught the values of competitiveness and individualism," Oliver observes. "Newer approaches open them to the view that everything's interdependent and you're not the center of the universe."
So this week, over the course of two days, he tested the educational impact of his environmental game in the profile courses of Ms. Vanya Sheneva and Ms. Kirilka Dancheva and the electives of Ms. Elka Kondakova. We are eagerly awaiting the results.
