games-in-the-classroom
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World of ClassCraft inspires kids to work hard in school
Would you have done better in high school physics if it had been gameified? In this BBC report, Mr. Young, a physics teacher in Quebec, Canada, explains that doing just that has made a difference in his own classroom. Mr. Young divides his students into groups of eight, and within each group students are offered the role of a warrior, priest, or mage. Each start out with a few base abilities, and can earn more through the accumulation and expenditure of experience points. How do you earn experience points? By turning in assignments on time, behaving yourself in class, and helping others with their homework. Each character also has hit points, just like in WoW, and you can lose hit points through poor classroom behavior or missing homework deadlines. If your hit points go to zero, you earn yourself a detention or some other sort of penalty. But your teammates can help you out, too. Warriors, with their large hit point pool, can soak damage, and priests can heal it back. Like this, teams are encouraged to work together and help each other learn the material. Mr. Young calls the whole system "World of ClassCraft" in honor of WoW, which it imitates.
UK education boss Michael Gove wants games in the classroom
Michael Gove has served as Brtitain's Secretary of State for Education since May of 2010. Since being appointed, Gove has called for a number of reforms for the British education system, including restructuring and intensifying language requirements both foreign and domestic, as well as strengthening standards in science and "maths." Now, Gove has set his sights on video games as a way of making the British education system more engaging for children. "When children need to solve equations in order to get more ammo to shoot the aliens, it is amazing how quickly they can learn," said Gove, speaking to the Royal Society in London regarding Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy's Manga High system. Manga High, which allows educators to schedule online assignments that automatically reward items in accompanying flash games, represents the future of early science and math education, according to Gove: "These developments are only the beginning." In related news, we somehow managed to make it all the way through this post without making an "Eh, Gove?" joke.
Austin Independent School District makes deal to buy more video games for classrooms
We've seen educational video games show up in the classroom before, and it looks like one school district is coming back for more. The Austin Independent School District has ordered up another set of edu-games from a company called Tabula Digita that provides 3D, first-person action-based games to teach students how to do basic math and algebra. One sample scenario in the games has students calculating the location of an in-game weather station on a graph, and then using the data found there to make charts and track down alien creatures. The press release doesn't mention costs, but according to its website, 15 single-user licenses to the games cost the school $1049.25 each, making up a cost of just over $24,000 for the entire 350 student program. The students, who were part of a 10-day JumpStart program and had previously failed a math retest, were allowed to play the games for 30 minutes a day, and, afterwards, 82% of the kids said they had improved their understanding of the concepts. No word on how their k/d ratio came out.
