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10/05/07
Pomona College Students Create Slinky Bomb, Win $25,000 in Computer Game Contest |
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Three Pomona College students created a new computer game
that “secretly” teaches physics concepts to middle school
students and captured the $25,000 first prize in the
national Hidden Agenda computer game design contest.
The goal of the contest, now in its fifth year, is to
inspire college students to build entertaining games that
teach middle school subjects. Final judging was based on 70
percent entertainment and 30 percent educational value.
This year two Pomona entries made the final five. The
winning entry, Slinky Bomb, was built by Alexander Haro,
Class of ’08; Tim Brown, ’07; and Kurt Ude, ’09. The game
teaches physics through a series of ball-in-the-cup puzzles
that demonstrate properties such as motion, acceleration,
energy and angular momentum. Among the creators’
motivations, according to Haro, were both the prize money
and the fact that Pomona teams had finished in the finals
three times but never won.
The team estimates that development took about 400 hours
with most of that packed into a three-week period. Brown
notes that, “The last night of work was pretty crazy. We
decided to add in voice-overs at roughly midnight and had
them in by 6 a.m., while adding the hints features and
sounds. We were hyped up on caffeine and throwing tennis
balls against different surfaces to record sound effects
while trying to add as many cool features to the game as we
could before submitting. It was hectic, but fun!”
“The three of us had already been up for basically three
days straight,” explained Haro. “Yet, somehow, we managed to
have one of our most productive nights then. During that
time we were able to implement the hint interface, record
the voice overlays, and fix a lot of long-standing bugs.”
More than two dozen teams entered the contest, and the five
finalists were invited to Austin, TX for the final judging,
which included testing by middle school students.“The first
day was awesome, said Brown. “Hearing and seeing the kids'
excitement with the game was incredibly rewarding but it was
also great to see the teachers really enjoying it. It was
nice to see that our game was actually fun to play and
appreciated by teachers, learning experts, and professional
game developers at the same time.”
For Haro, “The memory that sticks out most was when we first
arrived to the contest playing area. All of the kids were
playing the games on the computers and most of them were
playing Slinky Bomb…. A boy stood up and asked us, ‘How did
you make Slinky Bomb so awesome?’ The fact we had built a
game was an accomplishment, the fact that the kids enjoyed
it so much took that sense of accomplishment to a whole
other level.”
The contest judges were: NCsoft, a game development company;
a team of instructional designers from the University of
Texas and Enspire Learning; Marc
Prensky, a digital game-based learning consultant; and the
teachers and students from the Camp Wired program in Austin,
TX, which teaches middle school
students how to create video games.
The second Pomona College team making the Hidden Agenda
finals consisted of Charles Zhou ‘08 and Edward (Ed) Burns
’08, who created CheMeteor in which
players create chemical-based missiles to defend the planet.
The Hidden Agenda contest is sponsored by the Liemandt
Foundation, a nonprofit family foundation dedicated to
furthering education through technology. Among
their goals is the hope that winners will go on to devote
their talents to developing educational games when they
graduate.
Slinky Bomb has already been installed on over 4500
computers, which have been given to underprivileged middle
school kids in urban areas through a partnership between the
Liemandt Foundation and the nonprofit Computers for Youth. |
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