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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.
NIU professor teaches engineering through video games
At Northern Illinois University, engineering professor Brianno Coller teaches both "Dynamic Systems and Control" and "Computational Methods." Rather than simply employ traditional methods of teaching, though, Coller instead creates video games to actively engage his students in engineering principles. According to an AP piece on Mr. Coller, he began showing his students Mars Rover landing footage from NASA (computer generated) and "Students would always be sort of on the edge of their seat watching this thing because it's just so cool to see how it works, but that sentiment ended as soon as you turned off the video, and then they're back to their boring old homework again," he says. Coller came to the conclusion that he needed a "simulation that allowed students to design a desired movement or action using the required formulas and algorithms that apply to all types of engineering." In so many words, Coller was thinking about a video game to explain engineering principles to his students. And now, five years later, he's found success with his games -- one of which has students applying rate of speed and geometrical calculations to a car being driving around a track -- and The National Science Foundation is offering financial support for future development. "You're applying what you learn throughout the semester, so you apply stuff without even knowing it," one satisfied student told the AP. For those of you future engineers thinking Northern Illinois University might be the place for you (after reading this piece, naturally), the school will be expanding Coller's "gaming as teaching" approach to new engineering classes in the future.
Update: Teaching with Games project discovers school computers are not up to date, holding students back
Last September, when Teaching with Games project* workers headed into UK schools with stacks of CD-ROMs, they didn't anticipate that the schools' computers would not be equipped with CD-ROM drives. Futurelab's Annika Small believes that technology is affecting the UK education system's ability to adapt to the times. "If you look at a classroom, it has hardly changed at all in the past 150 years," says Small.The current education system is at odds with technology, scrambling to combat tech-savvy kids who are using devices, like their cell phones, to cheat. Small argues that if schools embrace technology and train teachers to tap into its educational potential, students will readily reform.*The Teaching with Games project is run by Futurelab, an education charity, in collaboration with Electronic Arts.See also: And today's homework is: play videogames
