A game that helps students experience the speed of light

Some six-year-olds, like my son, are able to run at or faster than light speeds -- so they claim -- so they are comfortable with the relativistic changes that occur at high speeds, in which space warps, invisible light shifts into the visible spectrum, and they see images of objects as they existed in the past. However, most of the rest of us terrestrial snails cannot conceive of the ways in which the universe changes for objects that are moving at or near the speed of light.

However, there is hope; a light at the end of tunnel.

The people at MIT's Game Lab have found a beguiling way to create a sensory gaming experience that mimics and demonstrates many of the shifts that occur at relativistic speeds:  time dilation, Doppler effect, searchlight effect, and Lorentz transformation, for example.  It's called A Slower Speed of Light.

The game itself is simple -- walk around a virtual world, and pick up 100 things that look like neon eyeballs.  But there's a catch -- each sphere you pick up slows down the speed of light -- so after a while, your walking speed is very close to 'c.'

Their game is a great example of a new way that many technologies now can help students learn 'experientially,' rather than just by processing explanations.  

In Khan Academy, for example, students build an intuitive understanding of various mathematical concepts, through exercises like "Parabola Intuition," for example, with which they manipulate a system by changing variables, and witness the system change before their eyes.  If students have a more instant, gut-level, physical understanding of a concept, as well as the linguistic or mathematic understanding, they may be able to work more adeptly with these concepts, and transfer them to new situations.

Certainly, this type of game or experience is not enough to fully teach students about physical concepts like time dilation -- but it adds a dimension that may bring the more conventional methods into a new light, no matter the speed.