To those who say that computer games have no place in the classroom Tim Ryland’s use of Myst to support learning provides a comprehensive refutation.
Tim Ryland’s website is at: http://www.timrylands.com
A FutureLab report on the use of games for learning can be found at: www.futurelab.org.uk
Quest Atlantis http://crlt.indiana.edu/research/qa.html is a research project from Indiana University and The National Science Foundation in the USA.
“Quest Atlantis (QA) is a learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. Building on strategies from online role-playing games, QA combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities (known as Quests), talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. A Quest is an engaging curricular task designed to be entertaining yet educational”
Quest takes the form of a narrative based adventure and there is a novel called “Archfall” which leads students into the narrative and therefore eventually the role play through narrative that forms the Quest Atlantis World.
Some research
What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy
JAMES PAUL GEE
University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003)
The move from page to screen: the multimodal reshaping of school English Carey Jewitt Institute of Education, University of London (2002) taylorandfrancis.metapress.com
Re-thinking Assessment: multimodality, literacy and computer-mediated learning
Carey Jewitt Institute of Education, University of London (2004)
