The Mars Game, developed by Lockheed Martin Mission
Systems & Training in partnership with StandardsWork, Inc. , was selected as a
finalist in the 2015 Serious Games Showcase and Challenge in the Business Category.
The Pentagon’s Office of Training and Readiness
Strategy’s Advanced Distributed Learning laboratory (ADL lab) researchers and
Lockheed Martin’s Mission Systems and Training (LMMST) team have joined forces
with award-winning educators to create a math and programming Serious Game that
is engaging and highly captivating with a subtly embedded, but highly focused
set of learning objectives.
In The
Mars Game, the player takes the role of an autonomous Mars rover, sent to
prepare a habitat for a team of human explorers who are already en route. Just
before landing, the rover’s spacecraft is struck by a rogue asteroid, and the
rover crash lands in a damaged state, its equipment and supplies scattered in
all directions. Students need to work through a series of interactive
mathematical and programming problem-solving challenges to help the rover
gather its parts from the surrounding environment, repair itself, and regain
contact with the human explorers who are doomed without the player’s help.
Developers have created a breathtaking test bed
for their primary hypothesis that Serious Games that are designed at a
fundamental level to be fun (in their own words “to be games, and not dressed
up homework”), are far more effective as learning tools.
The
uniqueness of The Mars Game approach can be increasingly experienced as
we progress through the four game missions, each focused on a different set of
learning content. The Serious Game scores amongst the highest on seamless integration
I’ve ever played: the degree to which the learning content is tied into the
game mechanics and the story immediately grabs our attention and very early
inspires the familiar, “motivated state of eagerness” that keeps us actively
engaged and wanting for more.
In
addition, the game’s platform and architecture may soon constitute another
major breakthrough: Virtual
World Framework, the new platform for
distributed, immersive training applications on which The Mars Game
runs, is expected to make it easier, faster, and less expensive to develop
Serious Games that can reach users around the world. Software written for
this platform can be accessed by multiple players at once in an ordinary web
browser environment. And because the software can be deployed to central
servers, authors can quickly update the content for all users while preserving
the player experience.
Last but
not least, the architecture was conceived so that the game could be adapted to
any grade level as well as content be created far beyond just math and
programming - the Mars colonization story environment could lend itself to a
wide variety of topics, from physics, botany, and chemistry to psychology and
political science and beyond.
GENI’s Infrastructure - A Gamer's Dream
When the researchers from Lockheed Martin and
the Pentagon began to imagine how the game would be distributed, they initially
considered using commercial hosting services. But that changed when Mark
Torpey, principal investigator at Lockheed Martin, learned about the Global Environment
for Network Innovations
(GENI)--an ultra-high-speed, experimental networking testbed, supported by NSF.
GENI is an ideal network environment for shared
and collaborative applications, like multiplayer games, that require that the
time between a click and an action--the network latency--be short.
Unlike the networks that we use every day to
route information over the web, GENI is a programmable network, meaning many
aspects of its operation can be tuned by the user to the needs of the data and
application.
Also unique about GENI is the fact that instead
of data bouncing between unknown Internet service providers en route to a
destination, individuals own an end-to-end "slice" of the GENI network,
passing the data without interruption.
GENI is, in essence, a gamer's dream.