Sector Vector For Today’s Outside Class

Physics Lab as a board game!?! That is such an awesome idea. Earlier this year at the AAPT meeting in Orlando, Florida, we meet the team from The Fourth Law – a startup company that makes the physics board game called Sector Vector. (Was the winter AAPT meeting in 2020, it seems like 50 years ago?) James St. John, our lab coordinator, loved the game and actually played it in Orlando one night with the “The Fourth Law” team. We thought we should give this a try in a few labs this year and see what happened. Our original vector lab (force tables) were pretty boring.

Sector Vector Board Game (picture from the Sector Vector website)

Sector Vector is basically a space battle game. You have projectiles (or lasers) that can fire at enemy space ships. Your goal is to maneuver your space ship around, hit people with the projectiles, and avoid being hit. The game is realistic in one sense, the only thing you can control is your thrust. So at the beginning of every turn you have an initial velocity (left over from the last turn) that you have to account for. There is some strategy and some luck involved. Its a solid board game. I enjoyed playing it.

We were going to try this in the lab. Then COVID hit!

COVID Curveball

So James St. John (our lab coordinator) and I started thinking, what if we did Sector Vector outside? What if have the team was in a command center remotely and they were there to assist in the calculations similar to how the Battleship game (You sunk my Battleship) goes. This way we could do game for in-person students and online students.

So here’s what we did. Each game piece was a large hula-hoop. We scaled up all the movements – instead of being able to move 10 cm, 20 cm, and 30 cm, as they do on the game board, we could move 10 m, 20 m, and 30 m. Our missiles were tennis balls. Each team had consisted of two people in-person and two online (via zoom). Each team was given 5 minutes to determine their next move.

Take Aways:

The online part was hard. The students online didn’t really get the same experience as those who were in-person. I am holding a special zoom class for those students who want to discuss the calculations we did in person. One of the groups stopped using zoom altogether and just called their team on the cell phone. In the future, I would only play the game with folks in person.
The learning curve for the students was high. There were a number of concept and calculation mistakes in the beginning. (I made them use their stated thrust vector even if they made them do something non-ideal.) While this made the game more difficult it added to the learning experience for the teams playing the game. By the end of the game, students were making very good decisions about where to aim their thrusters and fire their missiles. And they were getting the calculations correct. SO THAT IS A WIN – THE STUDENT’S LEARNED PHYSICS!
A pre-class video on adding vectors was super helpful.
The space ship (hula-hoop) was too small and it was difficult to hit. We need to use a bigger target or make the movements smaller. We played too long without a hit. I am sure the board game thought about the size of target.
In the middle of the class folks seemed to be having fun. Though it was stressful in the beginning and got a little old at the end.
To make the game more exciting, I told the students that the winners wouldn’t have to write a lab report this week. (Which was true, but no one was going to have to write a lab report, hehe.)
The white board on wheels is awesome and necessary. I wheeled it around and double checked student’s work. Talk about just-in-time teaching! It was beautiful.

We were already on the softball field when the class ended. And the lecture part of the class was coming in, so we just had the “lecture” class in center field of the softball field. Well, of course, “lecture” is not the right statement because it was a problem solving class. (Talk about an awesome, relaxed class environment.)

We will play the in-person board game in lab in the future for sure. I am not sure if we will do it outside again though. I thought outside would be better for social distancing but it is hard to social distance when you work in groups.

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