When Students Discover Verne Was Dreaming: Teaching Physics Through Impossible Engineering
By Guillermo Ithier
The moment I knew the game was working came at 10:47 AM on a Thursday in Ridgefield Park. An eleventh-grader named Marcus—who had spent most of September treating physics as an elaborate punishment—looked up from his calculations and said, “Wait. This can’t be right. The stress is like… seven times higher than steel can handle.”
His teammate Sarah leaned over. “Check your pressure value.”
“I did. Three times. It’s right.”
A pause. Then Marcus, with genuine wonder: “So Verne just… made up a metal?”
That’s the payload. Not the formula. The revelation.
The Problem I Was Trying to Solve
I’ve watched too many physics classrooms operate like assembly lines. Formula in, number out, repeat. Students learn to pattern-match: “Oh, this looks like a kinematics problem, so I use v² = u² + 2as.” They get correct answers. They pass tests. And they leave with no intuition whatsoever about why the square appears, what acceleration means as a rate of change, or how these relationships constrain real engineering.
The deeper problem is that physics education rarely lets students discover anything. We tell them escape velocity is √(2μ/Rₑ) ≈ 11,200 m/s and expect them to find this interesting. Why would they? It’s a fact delivered from authority, not a conclusion they’ve earned.
I wanted to build something where the mathematics revealed something students didn’t already know—where the answer wasn’t the endpoint but the beginning of understanding.
Why Jules Verne?
From the Earth to the Moon presented an irresistible design opportunity. Verne’s Gun Club faces a genuine engineering problem: accelerate a projectile to escape velocity within a finite barrel. The physics is junior-year mechanics. The setting is bounded—1860s technology, no carbon nanotubes, no handwaving. And crucially, the problem has no solution.
That last part matters enormously. Most physics problems are designed to have answers. Students internalize the assumption that if they calculate correctly, they’ll find a sensible result. But Verne’s cannon can’t work. The pressures required exceed any material his era could produce. Students who do the math correctly will discover impossibility.
This is profound. It mirrors how real engineering works: you calculate, and sometimes the numbers tell you no. The physics doesn’t care about your ambitions.
The Architecture: Scarcity, Commitment, Pressure
I built the game around three principles that I borrowed from economic game design and adapted for educational purposes.
Scarcity means students can’t buy certainty everywhere. They have limited Teacher Time (two tokens for the whole session), limited Group Currency, limited safety nets. They must triage. Which calculations are they confident about? Where do they need help? This forces metacognition—students must evaluate their own understanding to allocate resources wisely.
Irreversibility means early choices cast forward shadows. When the Producer commits to Press Deadline (fast but fragile) instead of Peer Review (slow but safe), that choice locks for the entire session. When the Astronomer selects a Δv_loss policy, all downstream calculations inherit that assumption. Students can’t hedge. They must commit under uncertainty—and live with consequences.
Shared Pressure means individual failures stress the entire team. The Week 1 Clock advances toward BREAKING POINT whenever gates are rejected. One student’s arithmetic error doesn’t just affect their grade; it threatens everyone’s success. This creates organic accountability without heavy-handed enforcement.
These three principles filter every design decision. If a mechanic doesn’t serve at least one, it gets cut.
The Station-Crawl
Four specialists, four stations, one dependency chain.
The Astronomer (Station 2) establishes escape velocity and adds atmospheric loss margins to get muzzle velocity v₀. The Artillerist (Station 3) receives v₀ and computes the acceleration required within 274 meters of barrel, then derives force and pressure. The Engineer (Station 4) receives pressure and determines whether any period-plausible material can survive the implied hoop stress.
Each handoff makes visible what textbooks obscure: physics is connected. An error in orbital mechanics propagates through ballistics into materials science. Students who treat these as isolated calculations—”I just do my part”—fail to notice when their results violate reasonableness. Students who attend to the whole chain catch errors by asking “does this pressure make sense given what we know about steel?”
That’s expert behavior. That’s what I’m trying to cultivate.
What Happened in the Classroom
I ran the game with several teams across multiple class periods. The patterns were consistent enough to constitute evidence.
Ownership shifted. Students waiting for their station didn’t zone out. They watched upstream calculations with genuine attention, because v₀ from Station 2 determined everything they’d do at Station 3. The dependency chain made passivity costly.
Reasonableness checking became spontaneous. I didn’t have to teach “sanity check your answers.” Teams approaching Station 4 started asking “does 375 megapascals seem right?” before they even started their calculations. Several caught arithmetic errors during handoff because the downstream player noticed an implausible magnitude.
Failure became instructive. Teams that hit BREAKING POINT and had to restart didn’t collapse into frustration. They approached the second attempt with diagnostic sophistication: “We shouldn’t have taken Press Deadline—the Backlash killed us.” “Our Minimal commitment put too much pressure on Station 4.” They were analyzing strategic decisions alongside computational ones.
The Revelation
Station 4 is designed to break expectations.
Students calculate hoop stress using σ = (P·rᵢ)/t for thin-wall conditions. With P ≈ 375 MPa and rᵢ ≈ 1.37 m, they get σ ≈ 3,750 MPa—assuming any thickness within the validity regime.
Then they look at material properties. Cast iron: ~200 MPa yield strength. Bessemer steel: ~500 MPa. The best materials available in Verne’s era fail by a factor of seven.
Every team’s first response is to recheck their math. They assume they made an error. When the numbers hold, the conversation shifts: “What if the barrel were longer?” “What if the projectile were lighter?” These are good questions. Students are reasoning from the relationships, not just manipulating symbols.
Eventually, they realize: Verne invented a fictional metal. “Columbiad Steel” exists because the physics demanded it. The author understood—perhaps intuitively—that his premise required materials beyond contemporary capability.
That’s the payload. Not “here’s how to calculate hoop stress,” but “here’s why Verne had to dream.”
What I Learned About Anti-Lawyering
Educational games in classroom settings face a specific threat: rules-lawyering. Students will find ambiguities and exploit them, not maliciously but because ambiguity exists and teenagers are clever. A game that can be won through argument rather than competence fails pedagogically.
Version 1.7 of the GDD includes what I call “anti-lawyering architecture”: exhaustive roll taxonomies that specify exactly which failures trigger which consequences, timing locks that prevent retroactive decisions, canonical reward clauses that eliminate negotiation about outcomes, and explicit stacking rules for tokens.
The key insight: students can’t argue their way out of REJECTED gates. They can only compute their way out. The game rewards mathematical correctness and strategic decision-making, full stop.
The Broader Vision
Week 1: The Target is a proof of concept. The station-crawl architecture transfers to other physics domains. Thermodynamics cycles (where Carnot efficiency functions as the “impossible ideal”). Electrical circuits (where power dissipation constrains design). Wave mechanics (where interference patterns validate or invalidate source configurations).
Any domain with dependency chains and physical constraints can support this structure. The tripartite lens—Scarcity, Irreversibility, Shared Pressure—is domain-agnostic.
What matters is the pedagogical posture: students discover through calculation rather than receive through instruction. The teacher becomes a referee validating process, not an oracle dispensing answers. The mathematics becomes a tool for revelation rather than a hoop to jump through.
Closing Thoughts
Marcus passed his mechanics unit exam. More importantly, he asked me after class whether other Verne novels had similar “impossible physics.” I pointed him toward Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the question of how the Nautilus generates power.
That’s what education is supposed to do. Not fill vessels but light fires.
The game worked because the physics matters. Not “matters for the test” but matters for understanding the world—including the fictional worlds we dream about. Verne’s Gun Club couldn’t have reached the Moon with 1860s metallurgy. Now my students know why. They calculated it themselves.
Guillermo Ithier is an educational game designer specializing in physics-based tabletop games for secondary education. Week 1: The Target is part of an ongoing project developing GURPS-based instructional materials that embed authentic physics within cooperative gameplay.