Alien Planet Game Tests Critical Reasoning Skills

8-18-97
University Park, Pa. -- It is the year 2413, and all nine planets in Earth's solar system are running out of room and resources. You, a pilot in the Intergalactic Exploration Squad, are searching the galaxies for a new planet the citizens of Earth can colonize. Your immediate mission: to determine whether an alien planet you are approaching will support human life and to judge whether it is worth colonizing.

This is the scenario for "Alien Planet," a computer-based simulation game Penn State computer science students are developing, in collaboration with a Penn State political science professor, to help teach a political science honors seminar in critical reasoning. Their alien planet, not yet fully functional but carefully worked out in concept, can be a dangerous place.

In the air, inquisitive flying lobsters search for their favorite food, the 12-ounce fruits of the beer plant. Mooscles, strong moose-like creatures with unusual coloration -- plaid with yellow antlers -- like nothing better than to catch the lobsters in their antlers, suck out their innards, and toss the shells aside. Underfoot, vicious tuna fish -- unlike their counterparts on Earth -- swim in the sand and attack for no reason.

Into this unfamiliar environment comes the intergalactic pilot, who can send limitless numbers of robot probes onto the planet's surface. The robots can do anything a human being can -- test the air for breathability, check the climate, or see if something is good to eat. But if the pilot sends out the probe without the right tools, it won't come back with the information the pilot needs to determine if the planet should be colonized.

The game is designed to be fun, but its purpose is serious: to help the students in Larry Spence's Political Science 300H class learn principles of critical reasoning. "Critical reasoning involves becoming self-consciously reflective about the ways we know the world," says Spence, director of the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning.

"When I was first teaching the course, I would try to come up with situations that would help the students reflect on how they think, on how they make the decisions they make every day. And they'd say, 'Well, I just think.' "

So Spence started to look for situations that were so odd that you couldn't count on your own perceptions. But the ideas he came up with didn't really work. Then, one day, a student had an inspiration. "You know," Spence remembers the student saying, "what you want is a computer game, like one with a planet where things run counter to our ordinary experience. That's how it got started."

At that point Spence approached Joseph Lambert, head of computer science and engineering in Penn State's College of Engineering. Together, they developed a program through which lower- and upper-division undergraduates would design software packages for "clients" on campus or in the community. (The lower-division students act as software engineers, the upper-division students as project managers.)

Lambert says that projects like "Alien Planet" require students to go off on their own and learn things that aren't part of the normal curriculum. On the one hand, they're learning about the latest developments in graphics interfaces, natural language processing and new programming languages, and so on. On the other, they're learning about concepts in political science, teamwork, and the ways that projects come together in real life.

"I think the students are learning how hard it really is to come up with a complete project," Lambert said. "Clearly, the students have enjoyed this more and learned more than they would have through a traditional classroom experience."

The project started in spring 1996 and will probably culminate in a finished product in another semester or two -- maybe three. At that point the political science students in Spence's honors course will be able to test-drive "Alien Planet" and see how well it helps them learn and practice the critical reasoning skills the course is intended to teach.

Looking back at the work of the past few semesters, project managers Matt Walnock and Dave Soroka said the toughest part of the job was to keep the "software engineers" focused on working as a group and contributing to the design of the program. (Walnock and Soroka, computer science majors, both graduated in May 1997.)

"In the beginning," said Walnock, "it was difficult to get across that this wasn't a class where they'd be given some kind of code and have to write it the night before it was due. It was hard to get across to people that they had to design stuff before they could start writing code. It took a semester before they really got a handle on what the problem was. But the following semester they came up with what they wanted the planet to look like."

Spence said that even though the project is taking longer than anticipated, the learning process is at least as important as the final product. "One of the problems, if you can call it a problem, is that the students put almost too much time into the course," Spence said. "They work so hard, and they have learned so many complicated things about computer programs, about new programming languages like Java, about natural language processing -- they've got the computer set so that it answers questions posed in standard English. They really like it."

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Contacts: Alan Janesch (814) 865-7517 (office) (814) 867-3621 (home) axj12@psu.edu