Physics 211 Web Project
   Playing with Physics

    With more modern technology the giant computers of the arcade machines became out dated and soon everyone could own there own small, operatade from home, Nintendo Entertainment System. With the release of the NES many games such as Mario Brothers, Metroid, Megaman, and Castlevania have all become very well known and populat games. What most of these games have in commmon is there side scroller game play that attracted most players. If we take a look at Super Mario World it becomes really easy to see how everythign that is going on in the game could be reduced to simple Kinematic equations. For kids to be able to see that Mario is firing something and to understand that it will bounce and have some force and have fun with it is great. Playing a game like Mario Brothers could simply be thought of as changing the forces of physics around you to achieve the goal in the game teaching kids how to be better able to understand physics.


Google Images
Google Images
Google Images
For the average Mario player this little Koopa doesnt pose much threat, they can see have far they are from the Koop and they know that mario jumps up and follows the law of gravity so they know that he will make a parabolic function. A player than says, "I need to hit the right directional pad and hold A for 2 seconds to jump high enough!" What a physics student might think is, "I know I have to make the force act in the positive direction and have to make sure I have enough force upward to make up for gravities pull of Mario." Because these ideas are so similiar it becomes easy for kids to understand why physics works the way it does.
 Everyone wants to get the best item that mario has, the Flower Power! This ability is a great example of the Kinematic equations. Kids soon learn that if they use the ability from a higher distance they can get the ball to go further. Given this we also know we could actually calculate the force Mario has on the flower and how he needs to be to know where exactly you want the ball to land. Kids learn this inhately when playing this game and learn how judge these forces so well that they know when the perfect time is. This process is similiar to how we conduct expiriments to find the force of a launcher and use that force to find how far the projectile will go
 Really there are alot of things about all video games that represent real fundemntal truths about physics, and people find ways to make the mundane details of everyady physics interesting and fun in a new setting. I beleive that video games have become a great way to stretch our way of thinking while having a good time and they can be educational by making people think about how physics works around them. And its very succesful, Nintendo has become a household name by taking what we know about physics and applying those laws in ways that people find fun and challenging.