artigo
Second
Life Physics:
Virtual, Real or Surreal?
Second
Life Physics:
Virtual, Real or Surreal?
publicado no Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, v. 2, n. 1, (special
issue: Pedagogy, Education and Innovation in Virtual Worlds), Apr. 2009.
Abstract
Science teaching detached
itself from reality and became restricted to the classrooms and
textbooks with their overreliance on standardized and repetitive
exercises, while students keep their own alternative conceptions.
Papert, displeased with this inefficient learning process as early as
1980, championed physics microworlds, where students could experience a
variety of laws of motion, from Aristotle to Newton and Einstein or
even “new” laws invented by the students themselves. While often
mistakenly seen as a game, Second Life (SL), the online 3-D virtual
world hosted by Linden Lab, imposes essentially no rules on the
residents beyond reasonable restrictions on improper behavior and the
physical rules that guarantee its similitude to the real world. As a
consequence, SL qualifies itself as an environment for personal
discovery and exploration as proposed by constructivist theories. The
physical laws are implemented through the well-known physics engine
Havok, whose design aims to provide game-players a consistent,
“realistic” environment. The Havok User Guide (2008) explicitly
encourages developers to use several tricks to cheat the simulator in
order to make games funnier or easier to play. As it is shown in this
study, SL physics is unexpectedly neither the Galilean/Newtonian
“idealized” physics nor a real world physics virtualization,
intentionally diverging from reality in such a way that it could be
called hyper-real. As a matter of fact, if some of its features make
objects behave “more realistically than real” ones, certain quantities
like energy have a totally different meaning in SL as compared to
physics. Far from considering it as a problem, however, the author
argues that its hyper-reality may be a golden teaching opportunity,
allowing surreal physics simulations and epistemologically rich
classroom discussions around the “what is a physical law?” issue, in
accordance with Papert’s never-implemented proposal.
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