University Course Uses Tears of the Kingdom to Teach Machine Design, Engineering

Posted on November 17 2023 by Kora Burton

Can you imagine receiving official college course credit for playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom? It seems that some lucky undergraduate engineering students at The University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) are doing just that.

The Topics in Mechanical Engineering course titled “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to Machine Design” launched within UMD’s A. James Clark School of Engineering this fall, allowing students the opportunity to play the game both in and out of the classroom while exploring areas of design, prototyping, and machine testing. Specifically, the second-year course focuses on how Tears of the Kingdom incorporates computer-aided design (CAD) in a simplified but intuitive interface. “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to Machine Design” was created by Dr. Ryan D. Sochol, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of UMD’s Bioinspired Advanced Manufacturing (BAM) Laboratory.

As Dr. Sochol was playing Tears of the Kingdom during its first few months post-release, he says he couldn’t believe how much the game was bringing him back to his engineering training. “The more experience I had with the game’s CAD assembly interface, numerous machine elements, and sophisticated physics, the more I felt it offered unique means to help students hone their skills in machine design,” he said. Another important reason why Tears of the Kingdom was a perfect teaching tool for the course is the way the game requires you to think about energy usage and battery depletion, a crucial aspect of design for engineering students learning to build real-world machinery.

Students enrolled in the mechanical engineering course were divided into teams, with each team receiving a Nintendo Switch console, a copy of Tears of the Kingdom, and a Pro Controller for the semester. After becoming familiar with the basics of the game, student teams have been investigating the mechanical elements of different Zonai devices and reporting their findings to the class. The course culminates in machine design challenges, where students must build a “transforming bioinspired amphibious robotic vehicle.” A significant portion of the students’ overall grade relies on the results of a final race: the vehicle that performs the fastest over both land and water will earn its engineering team an A+.

“We believe this semester’s pilot run of the course is just the beginning,” Dr. Sochol said. “We hope to leverage this special opportunity in which a video game is actually able to provide reasonably authentic and relevant learning experiences for students, [and] to inspire a lasting interest and confidence in machine design, engineering, and robotics.”

As a college administrator and former composition instructor myself, I’m blown away by the creativity of this course, and all the teaching opportunities it seems to present for teamwork, collaboration, and confidence-building. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Sochol’s course has a waitlist of more than double the current class limit, but the professor will reportedly be offering the course each semester “for the foreseeable future.”

What do you think of this college course using The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to teach mechanical engineering principles? Would you sign up for this class? Let us know down in those comments below!

Source: University of Maryland, College Park (via GoNintendo)