An Educational Tool for Creating Distributed Physical Games

The development of physical interactive games demands extensive knowledge in engineering, computer science and gaming. In this paper we describe how the Modular Interactive Tiles System (MITS) can be a valuable tool for introducing students to interactive parallel and distributed processing programming for physical games development. This is done by providing an educational tool that allows a change of representation of the problems related to game designing from a virtual to a physical representation. Indeed, MITS seems to be a valuable system for bringing into education a vast number of issues (such as parallel programming, distribution, communication protocols, master dependency, connectivity, topology, island modeling software behavioral models, adaptive interactivity, feedback, user and multi-user game interaction, etc.). This can both improve the education-related issues in computer science classes, and enhance the younger and older gamers with a highly interactive and physical experience. We illustrate how the MITS system can be considered a tool for easy, fast, and flexible hands-on exploration of these issues, and through examples show how to implement interactive parallel and distributed processing in games with different software game models such as open loop, randomness based, rule based, user interaction based, AI and ALife based games, morphology based games, and physical teleplay games.