I might be more interested in this than others reading EMUTalk.org because of my own scholarship and teaching, but I thought I’d go ahead and share it here anyway: from the current CHE, “5 Teaching Tips for Professors– From Video Games.” From the opening paragraphs:
[Constance] Steinkuehler, an assistant professor of educational communication and technology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, studies video gamers. In one recent case study, she noted how players in a chat room had used complex mathematics to argue for a certain plan of attack against some unruly beast.
“People were actually—no kidding—gathering data on things like the game monster’s behavior, putting it in an Excel spreadsheet, and building little mathematical models to try to beat the monster,” she told me recently. The game teaches complex problem solving and collaborative learning, Ms. Steinkuehler argues.
There’s also a nice little video with Will Wright, who invented “The Sims” and “Sim City.”
