"Good Morning. You All Have an F." - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 10

The topic is incredibly important. Today, students are struggling. They leave
school with the feeling they ve survived a grueling marathon instead of with an

abiding thirst to continue to seek knowledge. Society is not unaware of this.
Everywhere educators from K

'

12 to university professors are attempting to
negotiate the widening gap between decades-old teaching methods and the video
game-playing, social-networking students of today. This topic is the first attempt
to attack this challenge on its own ground: to create a new way of teaching that
not only re-engages students, but also teaches them more efficiently than the
standard lecture and exam grind.

-

We will start with efforts to bring video games and virtual worlds into the
classroom as teaching tools, a literal-minded approach that has had difficulties,
whether 1) existing commercial games are used, or 2) existing applied games, or
3) games designed for specific classes by outside developers or students, or 4)
games designed for specific classes by those teaching them.

Research on the efficacy of all four approaches, as we shall see, is mixed in its
findings. This isn t surprising. Research on the whole is quite good at measuring

whether appropriate subject matter is present in a game design. It is rare,
however, to find research that takes into account the quality of the game design
itself.

'

—

In the four iterations of the multiplayer classroom in this topic and in the

other case studies by other educators also presented here you will see that

necessary analysis at work just as it would be in the development cycle of
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves , arguably one of the best storytelling games of
2009, or single games from the Call of Duty , Grand Theft Auto, and Super Mario
franchises, that have grossed over a billion dollars each.

—

In August of 2010, I left Indiana University and headed east to become co-
director of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute (see Figure 1.5).

The third iteration of the multiplayer classroom, “ Introduction to Game

Design, was taught here during that first semester. It bore many similarities

to the two classes I taught at IU. Thanks to Marie-Pierre Huguet, then Senior
Course Developer, Innovation and Research in Teaching and Learning Office of
Undergraduate Education, and her team, we were able to document

�

the