Ars Technica has a short post here about the free download of Portal for Mac and PC that I mentioned yesterday on Dynamic Subspace here. I knew that Portal had a good physics engine, but I didn’t know that Portal is used in education. According to Ben Kuchera of Ars, Valve Software promotes this use of their popular video game through the Learn with Portals website. Learn with Portals encourages the use of Portal as an educational playground for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
I believe that this is a wonderful use of video games as a supplement to education, particularly in the STEM cluster. Outside of cultural readings of video games, this is a very useful nuts-and-bolts use of video games for learning.
Find out more about this on the Learn with Portals website here.
You have until September 20, 2011 to download Portal for free on your Mac or PC from here.
Dynamic Subspace 