Two teachers, Steve Isaacs and Cameron Pittman, discuss how they successfully engaged and motivated students with Portal 2, an award winning commercial video game by Valve Software. Steve, a middle school video game design teacher in Basking Ridge, NJ, uses the Puzzle Maker, the Portal 2 world-building tool, to teach computational thinking and the iterative design process in his courses. Cameron, formerly a high school physics teacher in Nashville, TN, turned the Puzzle Maker into a virtual physics laboratory. Leslie Redd, the former Director of Educational Programs at Valve, joins them to discuss how she created a community of educators through the Steam for Schools “Teach with Portals” project, which provided free copies of Portal 2 to educators and an infrastructure for teachers to collaborate. The session will focus on successes and challenges of using Portal 2 in the classroom from the perspective of educators and the companies supporting them.
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