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On Friday, November 14, game testers from Filament Educational Games came to 8th grade science classes at Mineral Point Middle School to beta test a new educational video game, which is perfect for physics classes. It is a catapult balloon game and students must decide how much tension, etc to place on their catapult.

The game is built on Flash, and the designers have been working on it for the past three months. They compared the process to writing a paper, where the mistakes aren’t often noticed until you give the paper to someone else to read. So that is the idea behind having students test the game out–they provide feedback on if the game is too easy, too hard, not cool, or does anyone even like this?

Middle school teacher Dan Rhode called the opportunity a “completely unique experience” as students used Chromebooks to work their way through the game as the designers observed and took notes while walking around the classroom.