NSF conference
root
There was a big push for teaching, especially related to CAS. I suggested
a joint effort with the game industry. The idea would be to use a game
like the bridge building game (www.bridgebuilder-game.com) and a CAS.
The idea of the bridge game is to construct a bridge and then apply a
load until it fails. Students could start building a simple model of
the bridge by attaching matrices to the ends of the beam elements.
Then they would predict the force to destroy the bridge and
be measured on how close their model is to the actual result. The next
class could add stress or strain or young's modulus or gravity load,
etc. At the end of 13 weeks, the grades are given by the final
ranking kept by the game program.
The point of the exercise is to develop the skills to construct models
using a CAS.
This seems like a "python-can-do-it" kind of project.
The NSF person at the conference liked the idea a lot.
Tim Daly
Ondrej Certik
Thanks for the update. In fact, with my colleagues we were looking for
some kind of a game for our finite elements (FEM) programs, and
building a bridge was one of the ideas we got. I didn't know someone
has already implemented it, even though they don't seem to be using
FEM.
Too bad I am just too busy to write any games, but it'd be cool.
Ondrej