The early stages of teaching the manufacturer’s skills, such as digital manufacturing, usually include simple exercises such as laser cutting or 3D printing of basic shapes and objects. In our hyperconnected and hyperstimulated world, this learning activity may seem a little disappointing, a feeling that prompted Dishita Turakhia, an MIT doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering and affiliated with the Computer and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (CSAIL), back. -Imagine the learning channel seeking to keep students interested, inspired and empowered. Since then, along with colleagues, including MIT professor Stefanie Mueller, Turakhia has developed a new system for teaching computational creation that allows children to make their favorite characters directly from digital games.
Q: What are some of the ways we can re-imagine teaching creative skills to young children?
A: One of the key factors in teaching young children skills is keeping them engaged, interested and inspired. So we challenged ourselves to re-imagine how digital manufacturing can be introduced and taught to young learners in a playful and fun way.
We designed a new approach where we combined the teaching of manufacturing with the game of video games. Kids are already playing a myriad of video games that have countless digital objects and characters with which players participate. So we thought, what if, while playing these games and interacting with digital objects and characters, children could make them to interact with them in the physical world and learn manufacturing and manufacturing skills along the way?
Think of an example where a young apprentice plays the “PokémonLet’sGo” game and every time they capture a new Pokémon, they also receive the manufacturing files to make a physical Pokémon to add to their collectible. Or imagine that when a child playing the game “Legend of Zelda” acquires one of the rarest objects, Biggoron’s sword, he can make a physical version of the rare sword and use it as a game controller. Now, these young learners can play their favorite engaging games and make game objects with which they can have personal connections, while gaining knowledge about digital manufacturing, such as tool settings and material specifications, throughout the game. way.
Implementing this vision of teaching manufacturing through games, however, poses its two main challenges. The first challenge is to turn existing digital games into manufacturing games without open access to the game’s source code. The second challenge is to generate manufacturing files for the desired game objects without access to the game repositories or asset files. In our work, we addressed these two challenges using computer vision algorithms for object detection, segmentation, and extraction, and created a set of tools called FabO.
The FabO toolkit allows educators to select significant moments within existing games, for example, capturing Pokémon or acquiring the Biggoron sword, and labeling them as manufacturing events. When students play these games, FabO monitors their game for tagged manufacturing events. When they encounter a manufacturing event, FabO automatically generates the manufacturing files for the game objects within the event and notifies students. Students can make objects from their personal play during or after the game.
This idea of designing manufacturing games for learning can personalize the creator skills learning experience for young learners in an engaging and meaningful way by bringing game objects from their game to the physical world.
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FabO allows the integration of the manufacture of physical objects in video games.
Q: What is the use of re-expanding the game to the physical world?
A: This is a great question! Once we built our FabO toolkit, our next research focused on exactly that question: given the opportunity to bring digital objects into the physical world, how could the experience of both things be expanded? , learning and play?
To answer this question, we performed one exploratory studies where we invited participants to use FabO and turn existing video games of their choice into manufacturing games. Next, the characteristics of 47 manufactured objects from 33 different sets that participants chose to modify in manufacturing sets using FabO were analyzed. Our analysis indicated that this idea not only allowed us to fuse the two worlds of virtual play and tangible interaction through fabricated objects, but also allowed the creation of objects to which learners have personal associations and meanings. linked. In other words, this idea allowed all learners to bring unique objects to their virtual gaming experience into the tangible world, something like a timestamp of their game movement.
This personalization offered the opportunity to add another layer of personal storytelling to your learning experience. For example, several students playing the “PokémonLet’sGo” game would learn the same digital making skills, but each object made is unique according to their game!
Through our analysis, we identified five common categories or ways in which learners bestowed personal meanings and associations with objects made from their playability: objects of pride, objects of creative self-expression, objects of resources, objects. useful for expanding gameplay. the physical world and objects of shared experience. The latter category of shared experience is particularly unique for multiplayer games where these objects are associated with shared gameplay moments, such as team wins or team losses. Therefore, in the case of multiplayer games, another dimension of social connection and shared learning experience is attached to the objects made from their shared game.
Q: How might you see a system like FabO being used on Metaverse or with Roblox?
A: We see augmented reality as a natural extension of our system application. The promise of virtual universes like Metaverse and Omniverse, especially RA [augmented reality] environments, is that they can support learning through the perfect fusion of the digital and physical worlds. This seamless integration of the physical and the virtual is especially a game changer (pun!) For learning the creator’s skills due to the physical nature of the skills.
With a system like FabO, the experience of playing and learning can be integrated even more in an immersive way. Imagine, then, that a young apprentice playing the AR game of “PokémonGo” captures a Pokémon in a virtual world and is then transported to a virtual manufacturing lab to train on how to use digital manufacturing tools, such as the laser cutter and the 3D printer, to manufacture. your unique Pokémon. Once you have completed your training, you can confidently make the physical version of your Pokémon. This physical object can be returned to the AR world for a more interactive gaming experience, for example, during Pokémon battles.
In addition, because FabO allows any user (such as an educator) to design manufacturing events for another user (such as a student), this feature can be extended to various interesting social gaming experiences, especially for platforms such as Roblox. For example, an educator could design jointly created puzzles for their young learner class where each learner makes their play object, which is a piece of a larger puzzle that the whole class builds together.
Another scenario in which social games may have an interesting intersection with FabO is where users embed manufacturing events between them within the same game. Thus, although players may be playing the same game, depending on the “FabO version” of who they play, the events and objects of manufacture could vary widely, and therefore the learning experience of manufacturing could be unique.
Therefore, we think that there are several interesting avenues in which applications could be expanded for a system like FabO and we are excited to follow these directions in our research.