Forty-three years after putting a man on the moon, NASA sent the Angry Birds video game to space. A few months later, the birds traveled to the moon and later to Mars.

NASAs recent collaboration with gamemaker Rovio to create Angry Birds Space, in which players use slingshots to launch birds at pigs, is part of a series of computer game projects spearheaded by government agencies to encourage science, technology and math education.

Today, NASA has loftier goals: An upcoming $10 million massively multi-player video game would simulate life on Mars and eventually provide 100 hours of playing time on the iPad, Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox. When a beta version of Starlite is released later this year, it will be NASAs biggest foray into gaming, and one that Laughlin hopes will set the stage for future collaborations with commercial game developers.

There are more higher-end gaming projects going on at NASA than ever before, Laughlin said. Very few people are looking to textbooks to get students inspired anymore.

In the past few years, NASA has released an air traffic control simulator for the iPhone, a trivia game called Space Race Blastoff for Facebook and MoonBase Alpha, a multi-player game that cost $300,000 to develop and resulted in 20 minutes of playing time.

But as the agency grapples with persistent education budget cuts, NASA is experimenting with new business models to fund upcoming projects.

The agency had originally planned to pour $5 million to $7 million into Starlite over three or four years. But budget cuts took their toll, Laughlin said.

Gradually, NASA nibbled down the budget until it turned out we could only afford to fund the educational side of the game, he said.

The agency will now invest about $1.5 million in NASA content and expertise in the Starlite, while Project Whitecard, a Winnipeg-based firm that has already created two games for the Canadian Space Agency, will finance the rest.

The premise of Starlite is quite simple, said Khal Shariff, chief executive of Project Whitecard: Its the year 2035. You are a first-time explorer who has to leave the Earths orbit and travel to Mars. Once you reach the Red Planet, there are a series of challenges, such as orchestrating an emergency rescue mission to find a stranded astronaut.

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From ‘Angry Birds’ to multi-player video games, NASA ramps up investment in educational technology