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The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Burst!
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We at Joystiq believe no one deserves to starve, and many indie developers are entitled to a fridge full of tasty, fulfilling media coverage, right here. This week, Josh Hughes of Team Kaizen delves into the fun side of education, and the educational side of fun with Burst!, a PC/Android title that mixes explosions with science. What's your game called and what's it about?Our game is called Burst! and it's meant to be the indie rhythm game for indie musicians! In Burst!, players queue up and detonate fireworks to the beat of music. We've also integrated a tad bit of STEM design (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) into Burst!: Players unlock different elements off of the Periodic Table as they advance, which enables them to make new colors of fireworks -- this is how real fireworks get colors.Burst! is currently in a limited-functionality Flash-powered beta on the Android Market and it is available to play online.How can video games help students learn more about science and technology? What advantages does gaming offer teachers?Games naturally offer a "safe to fail" environment. Meaning, if you're testing out a physics-related problem, if something goes wrong you can asses it, start the problem over again and tackle it with the newfound knowledge from the failed attempt. This means users are engaged to solve problems instead of being presented with the fallacy that they are "too stupid" to solve them. I believe that, in true-blue educational settings, some of the most powerful game tools come from these user-generated-content games. This is because they not only can be used to teach information, but they directly engage users to go into create mode and experiment with the knowledge.It isn't something you regurgitate on a test anymore; it becomes key information in solving a problem within a game you care about. This relates directly to the test group of kids we are working with at a local grade school. These kids (eight of them, four boys and four girls from grades fourth to sixth) are learning STEM one meeting a week and learning LittleBigPlanet and game design two meetings a week. Within a very short period, they were asking their teachers if they could stay after school to learn, coming in on vacations and skipping class parties so they could engage in learning more.On their own accord, without teacher prodding, they asked if they could use school computers to build a shared-knowledge database on the school's network so their levels are as historically and scientifically accurate as possible. They've commandeered white boards and begun drawing out details of their levels, including time periods they need to research to make them perfect. And this is only a test group!I believe that these kinds of games will have an increasingly important role to play in education because of this kind of engagement; the learned knowledge means something and directly plays into self-empowerment and self-expression, so retention goes through the roof.
