Learning to Think with Portals

Meet Sydney, a nineteen year old girl from southern Arizona with a passion for astrophysics and Star Wars. From this description there are many people who would assume Sydney to be stereotypical nerd that plays video games and reads science fiction all day; however, many people would be wrong. Sydney has never had the opportunity in life to really play video games, and when she approached me with the request that I teach her how to play the video game Portal I was ecstatic to help her on her way to becoming a bonefied gamer.

Sydney was an interesting person to teach because her history with video games was extremely limited. In fact, her family never owned a video game console prior to Nintendo's Wii. And on top of that, her mother never let them own any game except for Wii Fit. The Wii Fit was able to provide her and her family with a couple of afternoons of entertainment, but after a couple months it become boring and uninteresting and eventually Sydney stopped playing the Wii altogether. When she made it to high school, she would occasionally get the opportunity to play Halo or Super Smash Brothers: Brawl at her friends' parties. Unfortunately, her playing time at these parties was never long because she was not very good at the games, and so someone would come along and take her controller after only a short while. But what Sydney lacked in experience, she made up for in passion. Sydney originally came to me spring semester of 2011, and asked me to teach her how to play Portal. By the time she requested my help, it was finals week and we ended up only getting to play for an hour or two the night before we both left Boston for summer vacation. The very night I returned to Boston to start the fall semester, I was met by Sydney at the airport and then dragged to her dorm to play some more Portal.

Portal is a first person puzzle shooter game that throws the player into The Aperture Science testing facility where they are the "mouse," really a young lady named Chell, that has to make it through the maze of puzzles using a gun that can create interspatial portals. The game also has a unique way of dealing with the physics of these portals and the rules the player has to learn concerning this physics is necessary to get past certain test chambers and puzzles later on in the game.

I believe that the best way to learn how to do anything in this life is to do it over and over again by yourself until you figure out how to do it correctly. This translated to my teaching style in that when we started the game I took the controller from Sydney for about a minute or two to show her the most basic controls, such as the using the left joystick for movement, the right joystick for controlling the direction the character looks, and the A button for jumping. I demonstrated these by walking around a little area at the beginning of the game, so that I would not interfere with Sydney's play at all. Then I handed the controller back to her and she began to play.

At first, I did not notice Sydney was having very many troubles because I was not as concentrated on the controller as I was on the screen, but after test chamber three or four I began to realize that she was really struggling with the two joystick controls. She was unable to use the right joystick and the left joystick together to make moving through the test chambers easier, and sometimes she would forget which joystick performed which function. It was not really noticeable though until test chamber