What is a Fortnite Physics Playground?

In this episode of the Digital Learning Today Podcast, Jeff welcomes Andrew Vanden Heuvel onto the show to discuss how he is using Fortnite to teach complex scientific principals to students of all ages. If you are a new listener to TeacherCast, we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Contact Page and let us know how we can help you today!

In This Episode …

• Video games make awesome laboratories: Virtual worlds make excellent pedagogical tools for science educators. They allow us to bend the laws of reality, enter into life-sized experiments, and recreate famous experiments from history.
• Why Fortnite? It's popular, it's playable on almost any device, and it has an incredible set of game creation tools (Fortnite Creative + Unreal Editor for Fortnite). Also, Fortnite's Replay mode can turn Fortnite into a virtual production studio, enabling amazing storytelling projects far beyond the scope of our science project.
• Fortnite and the Metaverse: I would argue the Fortnite can/should be thought of as one of the most widely adopted "metaverse" platforms available, and that (as such), it should be taken seriously by educators, employers, and other adults.
• The Fortnite Virtual Laboratory Curriculum: With the support of a MegaGrant from Epic Games, I created a set of virtual lab activities published as Fortnite Islands.
• The Fortnite Physics Playground: This free-play Fortnite island allows students to design their own physics experiments and extract the player's motion data in real-time from the game.

About our Guest:

Andrew Vanden Heuvel is an award-winning science educator recognized for using technology to create immersive learning experiences. He is an online astronomy professor teaching at colleges across the country. Andrew has consulted with organizations like NASA, Google, TED-Ed, and Epic Games to create engaging science content. His greatest joy is sharing his passion for the universe with learners worldwide, inspiring curiosity while making complex concepts accessible and fun.

Links of Interest

• https://www.andrewvh.com
• https://www.youtube.com/@AndrewVandenHeuvel
• https://www.instagram.com/stembite/
• https://x.com/avheuv
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-vandenheuvel/
• https://www.andrewvh.com/fortnite-physics

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