EAGER: Creating a Framework for Prototyping Science Missions.

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This is an exploratory project to investigate, prototype, and demonstrate a computational framework for developing science mission games or game-based virtual worlds. Mission-oriented science is a sizable part of the national agenda for research and development within many science, technology, engineering, or mathematically based disciplines. These missions are complex endeavors that articulate a life cycle of recurring socio-technical and economics-driven processes, such as mission planning, vehicle and payload or instrument design, launch, transit, arrival, landing and deployment, resources collection, return, and debriefing. Increasingly, students, teachers, scientists, engineers, technicians, and others need to become aware of, gain knowledge about, and ultimately encourage support and enthusiasm for new scientific missions. This research will articulate such a framework and provide a proof of concept mockups or prototypes for science mission games that employ this new framework. The results can serve as the basis for developing new research projects of interest to specific science research agencies or programs for creating new, mission-specific science games. Such games represent a new medium for communicating, educating, and engaging a new generation of people interested in new science missions and scientific grand challenges. By design, the approach must be science domain-independent, and a reusable computational framework for producing extensible science mission games would represent a new, high-value engine for innovation that serves to address the new grand challenges for science and technology, and to advance the collective societal mission of producing, sharing, and applying new scientific knowledge and technological practice within and across science disciplines. Mission-oriented science computer games provide game-play mechanics and play experiences that help players to (1) gain awareness, (2) acquire scientific knowledge, or (3) participate in customizing and extending the specified details of a scientific mission or exploratory expedition in a specific domain of interest. Such games can afford opportunities for the public to gain awareness of the mission and its potential consequences, for students to learn about the scientific foundations that characterize the domain or mission challenges, and for domain specialists or citizen enthusiasts to participate in articulating, refining, and optimizing the scope, scale, efficiency, and effectiveness of such science missions.