Exploring Mars: An Immersive Survival Game for Planetary Education

Designing educational games can be challenging as fostering academic engagement requires the learning outcomes to be encoded in the game mechanic. Many games that are intended to be educational do not successfully provide this integration and the resulting product can be boring, fail to deliver the learning outcomes, or present the user with periodic interruptions in flow. The aim of this work was to investigate how to design an engaging and effective educational game that teaches the player about planets and their environments. ‘Exploring Mars’ was designed and built to harbour a player’s intrinsic motivation to engage in enquiry-based learning through storytelling in a graphically rich environment with an Artificial Intelligence Non-Player Character (AI NPC). The aim of the NPC is to lead the player through a series of challenges, the solutions to which require them to investigate the planetary environment. In the game, the player assumes the role of an astronaut who has been inadvertently left behind on Mars by their crew following a severe dust storm. The objectives of the game are for the player to navigate the Martian terrain and discover and use essentials —oxygen, food, and energy sources— required for them to survive the Martian environment. The game environment was crafted using Unreal Engine 5 and provides an immersive, visually compelling representation of Mars which is rich in information content. Accompanying sound effects and audio dialogue with the NPC aims to further enhance engagement. The game was evaluated qualitatively through observations and interviews with adult players. Results confirmed that the game’s intrinsic gameplay mechanics and immersive environment were successful in imparting the game’s learning objectives. Areas for improvement were identified, but the game successfully demonstrates how enquiry-based learning can be fostered through a rich graphical environment that provides the setting for a compelling storyline, with learning scaffolded by AI. The success of the game suggests it could be extended to other planets and used by learners of different ages.