Video Game Physics

Creating labs for online science courses is always a challenge. One of my favorite approaches is to ask students to analyze the physics of a video game.

Using the free Tracker software, you can extract data from any video or screen capture file. I simply record a small snippet of a game and then ask students to collect data to answer an interesting question. For example:

• If Angry Birds uses realistic gravity, then how large is the slingshot? 
• In Plants v Zombies, when will the fast zombie pass the slow one?
• In the game Osmos, is momentum conserved?