Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

4.7.10 | Sheldon has taken the use of games for learning to new levels by formatting his course itself as a massive multiplayer game. The results, he says, are worthwhile.

Students who enroll in Sheldon’s course on multiplayer game design at Indiana University at Bloomington spend their time “completing quests (such as presentations of games or research), fighting monsters (taking tests or quizzes), and “crafting” (writing game-analysis papers and a video-game concept document),” writes Jill Laster at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s wired campus blog.

The class is divided into six zones where students have to complete tasks as a group. Students earn points instead of traditional letter grades, and Sheldon reports that students perform better as a group than they had in previous semesters.

‘They are more engaged,” Sheldon told the Chronicle. They are “the gamer generation, they are the social-networking generation, so this class is couched in the terms that they understand.”

Sheldon has posted his syllabus and tips for how to set up the classroom, quests, and grading structure on his blog at Gaming the Classroom.

Look for more in Sheldon’s third book, due out this summer: “Practical Game Design: A Toolkit for Educators, Researchers and Developers.”

Read more on virtual worlds in the classroom at Spotlight.