One of the other draws to Portal and later Portal 2 is that anyone can play it and have fun. In many first person games a novice will find themselves dead long before they have the chance to sort out the puzzle. With Portal and Portal 2 you do have to act quickly, but you are not being distracted by all those annoying bad guys shooting at you. On top of all of this, the physics and problem solving involved were simply amazing.

All of these features eventually led a few science teachers to start using Portal and Portal 2 to teach. The games are non-violent (except to the poor companion cube…) so there are no worries there and with the launch of the Portal Puzzle Maker teachers can make up their own puzzles based on different lessons.

After seeing this Valve decided to help teachers out. They have put together a special program for teachers that allows them access to a community, lesion plans, puzzle building tools, and licenses to use Portal and Portal 2 on as many school systems as they need all for free.

Vales page Learnwithportals.com hits the nail on the head with the following statement;

Using interactive tools like the Puzzle Maker to draw students in makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool and fun, which gets us one step closer to our goal – engaged, thoughtful kids!

As many complain about standardized testing seeing a tool that allows for reasoning and creative thinking to grasp concepts is a great thing. We think that Valve certainly has the right idea here…. Now it would be great to see them open this up to more than just teachers. Perhaps a tool for parents that home school their kids with the same access to lesson plans would allow them to enhance what they are already doing and spread the benefits of this type of learning to more than just schools.

Check out learnwithportals and teachwithportals to find out more

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