Teaching the Solar System with a Video Game

"Teaching the Solar System with a Video Game" presents Wentian, a Unity-based educational game designed to teach solar system astronomy by combining scientific accuracy with engaging gameplay grounded in game-based learning theory. The authors contend that abstract concepts such as planetary motion and scale are difficult for students to grasp, and that existing tools, including Universe Sandbox, Kerbal Space Program, and NASA Eyes on the Solar System, each lack some mix of interactivity, structured objectives, or accessible content that Wentian aims to supply.

The game is built on a 1:10,000 km scale and uses NASA textures, Kepler's and Newton's laws for orbital motion, quaternion-based inclined orbits, physically based rendering, and Newtonian flight mechanics. Its modular interface includes a radar, a mission list, and planet introductions revealed progressively as players advance. These design choices reflect an effort to make astronomical content both faithful to real physics and playable.

A user study with 13 participants, mostly males aged 20 to 30, reported that all ten questionnaire items received statistically significant positive feedback under one-sided binomial tests (p < 0.05). The strongest consensus appeared around learning clarity, learning content, and story, with all 13 respondents responding positively (p = 0.0001). The authors acknowledge that the small and demographically narrow sample substantially limits how far these significance results can be generalized.

The surrounding literature on educational video games and game-based learning, including work by Squire, a 2017 EdTechReview explainer, and Yu's study of digital full-dome astronomy education, frames the project's rationale. Taken together, the work offers a promising prototype with encouraging preliminary feedback, while its broader educational effectiveness remains to be established through larger and more diverse evaluation.