Language and Literacy are Missions of the Game

Thursday, 02 June 2011 09:52 Written by Nathalie Caron

Using video games in education is an increasingly popular means of engaging students. While science and math lend themselves particularly well to this medium, literacy and language education is also benefiting games and related research.

Whether through the games themselves or by using video games as a segue to improving literacy skills, educators are finding ways to make language acquisition an integral mission of gaming. Read More...

One such example comes from the Norwich Free Academy in Norwich, CT, where teacher Kevin Ballestrini is using a game-based course developed in collaboration with University of Connecticut associate professor Roger Travis, to teach students about Latin and the Roman culture as part of a recent introductory program.

Presented in an online-forum format, the missions or episodes of Operation LAPIS are structured to use some of the game-based mechanics found in role-playing games, such as “grinding” to level-up your character. This revolves around expanding the number of Latin words collected through missions or in texts read, allowing players to increase their vocabulary to better solve further missions.

Students work in teams to respond to daily posts, where a new chapter in a narrative and accompanying prompts appear. After reading the narrative, written in both Latin and English, students must do some background research within a codex—the texto-spatio-temporal-transmitter or TSTT, which essentially outlines all the information needed for a given mission—and decide what actions their game character should take.

A similar game-based course is also being offered for a program on Greek philosophical writings at the University of Connecticut, under the name Operation ARETE. This course also includes Twitter assignments.

Grouped under the “Project ARKHAIA” banner, this game-based course series also includes Operation MENIS (an introductory Greek course), Operation KTEMA (Greek historiography), Operation KLEOS (homeric epic and video games), and Operation FABULA AMORIS (Horace and Ovid on love in Augustan Rome). The Pericles Group, which brings together Ballestrini and Travis, as well as other literacy experts, will soon be developing Operation MYTHOS (a classical mythology survey course), while two other banner projects, “Project SCIENTIA” and “Project TECHNOLOGIA,” are being developed to address STEM education and educational technology.

http://gamefwd.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=408:fwd-news-language-and-literacy-are-missions-of-the-game&catid=56:educational-games&Itemid=20