Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
Features
2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Gaming
7/22/2006
:: Innovator: University of North Carolina-Greensboro
D'ES IT MAKE economic sense for ECON
201 students to return to their alien planet?
Challenge Met
Educational games have been used effectively for years to supplement traditional teaching. But at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, they’ve turned an entire course into a game, incorporating all the elements of effective education: content, communication, interactivity, application, and assessment.
Spurred by a need to boost “less than stellar” success rates in traditional economics courses, a dedicated team of more than 30 faculty and staff from the Department of Economics and the Division of Continual Learning (DCL) collaborated on the development of a game called REGEN. Robert Brown, UNCG’s dean of continual learning, cites two main reasons they turned to gaming: the intrinsically engaging and motivating nature of games; and the belief that the application of knowledge—the way learners apply knowledge to advance in a game—is essential for both comprehension and retention of theory.
By deciding to commit to the game-ascourse format, the team seized a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate that gaming is indeed an effective pedagogy. This fall semester, students can earn three undergraduate credit hours for taking ECON 201 entirely as a game.
How They Did It
Despite the obvious inferences, gaming is not child’s play. Economics is a difficult discipline, and the developers created the ECON 201 game format to teach economics as a way of thinking. Students learn by doing as they play the role of leader of an alien species that crash-lands on a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Earth. As the students build a society and evaluate whether or not they should attempt to return home, they learn to understand tradeoffs and deal with issues such as scarcity, savings and investment, supply and demand, market failures, and sustainable growth. To progress in the game, students must anticipate consequences and make decisions based on logical economic analysis.
The large interdepartmental development team received the oversight and endorsement of both Brown and Economics Department Head Stuart Allen. Key team developers included Assistant Dean of Continual Learning Nora Reynolds, DCL Director of Online Development Scott Brewster, and Economics faculty member Jeff Sarbaum.
To accelerate development, REGEN uses a two-dimensional environment with 3D images added only as needed for operability, with some layering to give the illusion of 3D. To save programming time, the team relied on commercial applications as much as possible.
Recommended Reading
- Get Users on Board
- Greening IT
- It's a Zinch
- Meeting up Virtually
- Online Tutorials to the Rescue
Now's the time to use online tutorials to streamline professional development and help desk management.
- Retention Rx
