CTE's Seahawk Getting Ready to Take Flight

“There will be no limit in terms of content,” says CTE’s Dave Peloff about the new LG2G simulation Seahawk. “It won’t just be for math. Teachers will be able to use it for other subjects, too. They might have aliens looking around to find William Shakespeare.”

Cool.

Dave, Sam Abramovich and the rest of the CTE team are working with Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab to develop and build Seahawk. And they’re making great progress with it, too. They’ll be getting input on their work in the coming months from math and science teachers and then testing the simulation with some lucky Baltimore County after-school students in the fall.

So what happens in Seahawk? Well, the setting is a six square-mile area around Washington’s Mount St. Helens that’s been recreated in virtual reality from actual real-world data. And the narrative is that players are part of a team of rescue workers who are searching for a lost child who’s been separated from his family. There’s lots of exciting flying action and adventure and various kinds of challenges that players must solve to succeed in the world of the simulation.

That sounds cool in terms of the game-playing experience. But what’s Seahawk actually going to teach kids? According to Dave, one of the main challenges in getting games and simulations into classrooms is that “teachers feel there’s a lack of good content that matches their learning objectives.”  With Seahawk, the CTE team is addressing this issue head on. The initial version of the simulation will be built around academic content in the STEM areas – science, technology, engineering and math. And that promises to please teachers of those subjects. But Seahawk is ultimately going to be a resource for teachers of all subjects. That’s because CTE is building the simulation so that teachers will be able to customize it to include any kind of academic content – Language Arts, Social Studies, History, anything (that’s where Shakespeare and the aliens come in…). And teachers won’t have to spend years learning computer coding or game design to do it. “We’re making [Seahawk] easy to use,” says Sam Abramovich. “We’re taking cutting edge software technology and providing the access and tools for teachers to use it to teach anything they want.”

Of course, it’s complicated work making a great tool that’s going to be easy to use. But the CTE team is definitely up to the task. When Seahawk does reach classrooms, Dave and Sam are sure it will give teachers the chance to be “ahead of the curve” in terms of the very latest educational technologies. And those teachers’ students are going to love flying around in a truly amazing three-dimensional world… while they learn the academic content they need to learn.

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