Interactive Game for Teaching Laser Amplification Used at the National Ignition Facility

Lin, E

关键词: AMPLIFICATION;    AMPLIFIERS;    CALIFORNIA;    COLOR;    EDUCATION;    EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES;    IGNITION;    JAVA;    LASERS;    LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY;    RETENTION;    STATISTICS;    US NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY;   

DOI  :  10.2172/964070
RP-ID  :  LLNL-TR-415585
PID  :  OSTI ID: 964070
Others  :  TRN: US0903452

学科分类：工程和技术（综合）

美国|英语

来源: SciTech Connect

【 摘 要 】

The purpose of this project was to create an interactive game to expose high school students to concepts in laser amplification by demonstrating the National Ignition Facility's main amplifier at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. To succeed, the game had to be able to communicate effectively the basic concepts of laser amplification as accurately as possible and to be capable of exposing as many students as possible. Since concepts need to be communicated in a way that students understand, the Science Content Standards for California Public Schools were used to make assumptions about high school students knowledge of light. Effectively communicating a new concept necessitates the omission on terminology and symbolism. Therefore, creating a powerful experience was ideal for communicating this material. Various methods of reinforcing this experience ranging from color choice to abstractions kept the student focused on the game to maximize concept retention. The program was created in Java to allow the creation of a Java Applet that can be embedded onto a webpage, which is a perfect medium for mass exposure. Because a game requires interaction, the game animations had to be easily manipulated to enable the program to respond to user input. Image sprites, as opposed to image folders, were used in these animations to minimize the number of Hypertext Transfer Protocol connections, and thus, significantly reduce the transfer time of necessary animation files. These image sprites were loaded and cropped into a list of animation frames. Since the caching of large transition animations caused the Java Virtual Machine to run out of memory, large animations were implemented as animated Graphics Interchange Format images since transitions require no interaction, and thus, no frame manipulation was needed. This reduced the animation's memory footprint. The first version of this game was completed during this project. Future work for the project could include the creation of focus groups to assess the effectiveness of communicating material through an interactive game. Numerical assessments programmed into the game could also be used to collect statistics that reflect difficulty or level of frustration that students experience.