Just Ask the Avatar in the Front Row

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Gaming & Virtual World Technologies

Just Ask the Avatar in the Front Row

5/1/2007

By Neal Starkman

Cisco academies, which comprise 400,000 students annually, and are affiliated with universities and high schools. The academies provide students with IT skills and deliver webbased content, online assessment, student performance tracking, hands-on labs, instructor training and support, and preparation for industry standard certifications. Bush’s most recent goal: to get his students to learn the binary numbering system—by playing a game. He says he learned the system himself as he was designing the game: At some point during the process, he recalls, he found that he was “thinking in binary.” He reports that individuals who then played the game worked through about 50 problems in five minutes, and had fun while they were doing it. The players disclosed that they recognized patterns they wouldn’t have discerned the old-fashioned way— that is, via paper-and-pencil homework problems. So far, 35,000 Cisco students, and others in 100 countries, have played Bush’s game. Is it the best way to learn? Bush makes a compelling point: “Maybe it’s not better, but it’s more motivating,” he asserts.

In contrast to Gitelman’s three-year odyssey to develop a blockbuster shooter game for the commercial market, designing a game for the Cisco academies takes Bush about two to six months—as long as he has the three major contributors he needs: a learning expert, a subject-matter expert, and a game expert. The concept, says Bush, is simple: “You have to solve a problem, and the game is part of the solution.” The challenge for pedagogy as a whole, then, is to combine the immersion of Gitelman’s Shadowrun with the lure and accessibility of Allington’s Game- Fest, plus the very real academic benefit of Bush’s binary game.

Going Virtual

Many believe the answer lies in the virtual world: a landscape in which the players exist “inside” of the game, socializing with others in the same virtual game environment, expressing themselves and, thus, learning.

Take, for instance, Second Life, a 3D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by (at latest count) 5.2 million individuals from around the globe, with 60,000 residents added daily. Anyone who downloads the software can participate in Second Life—even a university.

At Ohio University in Athens, OH, Bill Sams is executive in residence and project manager for the institution’s outreach and regional campuses, and that includes the Second Life campus of Ohio University Without Boundaries. Although students can meet fellow learners there, view art installations, and take classes, they can’t get there by car, plane, or boat; only via the virtual world Second Life. But Sams points out that those partaking are not merely participants in the virtual world; the unique aspect of Second Life is that the users can “own” their part of the world.