Georgia Tech’s Aditya Anupam and Ridhima Gupta received the Students' Choice Award at the Serious Games Competition, held November 30-December 4 during the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida.

Anupam and Gupta, an M.S. student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and an M.S. student in the College of Computing (CoC)/School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) respectively, received the award for Particle in a Box, their educational game on quantum mechanics, which they showcased at the conference.

For the past two years, supported in part by a GT-FIRE Award, an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students from ECE; LMC; CoC, and the College of Architecture (CoA) have been working on the design and implementation of a succession of virtual worlds governed by the laws of quantum mechanics to help students gain an experiential understanding of the counterintuitive behavior of particles at the nanoscale.

Out of a total of 18 finalists, eight teams were competing for the Students' Choice Award. These games were played by more than 140 middle and high school students who voted for these games.

This Georgia Tech team is coadvised by Nassim JafariNaimi and Azad Naeemi, an LMC assistant professor and an ECE associate professor respectively. In addition to Anupam and Gupta, the team consists of Annick Huber, Tanisha Wagh, Shaziya Tambawala, and Sahib Singh, all graduate students from the CoC Human-Computer Interaction program; Justeen Lee, an undergraduate in the CoA Industrial Design program; and David Chiang, a graduate student in the LMC Digital Media program. Past contributors to this project were Rose Peng and Mithila Tople (both of CoC/LMC), Bill Dorn (Computer Science), and Baishen Huang (ECE).  

The Serious Games Showcase & Challenge is the premiere venue for recognition of excellence in the field of Serious Games development. The Challenge prides itself on helping foster creativity and innovation in Serious Games since 2006 as part of the I/ITSEC, which is organized annually by the National Training and Simulation Association and funded by three military departments and industry.

A review of the conference featuring this game can be found at http://www.gamesandlearning.org/2016/01/04/ed-developers-find-inroads-in-defense-focused-serious-games-awards/. To learn more about Particle in a Box and to play the game, please visit http://learnqm.gatech.edu/.