Portal 2 Puzzle Maker: Making Space for Physics

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Parents who are passion pushers try to make something out of nothing  every time their kid show the slightest interest in an activity (by mislabeling it passion) especially when that activety does not involve a "game console". The conventional wisdom is that the kid needs to have a passion that is deep, easy to articulate, well documented and makes him/her stand out from the crowd. When children can’t find their elusive passions, yet feel compelled to proclaim one, they grab onto an interest, label it a passion and buy the requisite instrument or equipment. For tweens like us it isn’t about passion (not yet), but rather about exploration, some of us are lucky to have parents who nurture that exploration and not put an end to it. Others create an expectation that children must find their one true interest so early in life, they cut short a process of discovery.

Lucky for us the game developers at Valve give us chance to explore and learn hands-on. They didn’t set out to create a game that captured the imagination of math and science teachers from across the country. But soon after the release of Portal, they began receiving emails from teachers who were using the game in their classrooms. Some worked at private high schools, others at urban middle schools. A few taught at the college level. All were eager to share their enthusiasm for Portal with the development team. Valve had never thought of itself as being in the education business, and the company wasn’t sure how it could support teachers. Their expertise was in game development, not in learning, they thought. But Valve has always been inspired as much by conversations happening outside of the field of video games as within it, so they started talking to educators to find out more. How did students think about motivation and engagement? What did teachers consider to be qualities of optimal learning environments? What did schools think of student-directed learning? 

Portal 2 Puzzle Maker

The game takes place in the Enrichment Center for Aperture Laboratories—also known as Aperture Science—which is the fictional corporation responsible for creating the portal device. The Portal games were created using a physics engine, which is computer software that simulates real world physics.

Portal and Portal 2 are non-violent, cleverly written games that challenge players to solve puzzles within a three-dimensional world. Student players must maneuver objects and themselves through the world in order to solve the puzzles and progress from one level to the next.

The game features Chell, the player-controlled female protagonist, and GLaDOS (short for Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System), a computer artificial intelligence that monitors and directs the player.


Players primarily interact with the world by using a hand-held portal device to place interconnected portals on walls, floors, or ceilings. Once a pair of portals is positioned any object entering through one portal will exit though the other.

puzzle design

Left : 7th graders visitng  the company Valve who created Portal 2 (on their field trip).

Above: STEM teacher Don LaBonte used the Portal 2 Puzzle Maker to engage his students in demonstrating math and science problems through game design.

The Puzzle Maker is a powerful toolset that allows students to produce their own content from within Portal's game world. 

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physics using portal 2 Belmont University

Learning Physics with Portal 2:
Belmont University.

The Portal 2 level editor provides a sandbox environment for students to build their own portal 2 levels. Students will learn how the puzzle elements work by playing through select test chambers as the provided test chambers demonstrate a number of the puzzle maker tools in isolation.

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3 of 3: ideal gas law

Ideal Gas Law demo using Portal 2.

Students will design, create, troubleshoot, and improve upon their own puzzle levels as they engage in the process of iterative design by collaborating through a number of phases of peer evaluation and feedback.

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