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Features
ECON 201: A University Economics Course as an Online Computer Game
9/5/2006
By Robert M. Brown, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Creating a college course totally as an online computer game seemed feasible when Assistant Dean Nora Reynolds and I first discussed it last year. After all, our team had developed over a hundred online courses and had been creating interactive games as drop-in learning objects in courses for years. We would simply “step up the effort a little.”
Sometimes it helps to underestimate the magnitude of a project, for if my colleagues and I at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro had fully appreciated the enormity of converting a college course into a computer game, we may not have had the courage to tackle the project. In the end, however, our team made a heroic 18-month effort and produced a unique, cutting-edge course in game format – ECON 201, one of the first of its kind. Some of the game features can be viewed at http://econ201.uncg.edu.
The Division of Continual Learning’s (DCL) Online Development Group at UNC Greensboro is basically a production facility that assists faculty in putting courses online. The staff includes instructional designers, graphic designers, coders, audio-video experts, and editors who help faculty re-conceptualize courses, brainstorm innovative ways of teaching online, and create learning objects within the redesigned courses. Typically, we develop 25 interactive multimedia courses online each year.
Major players in development of ECON 201 were: Provost Edward Uprichard, who provided funding and gave us the latitude to take calculated risks; Nora Reynolds and Scott Brewster in DCL; and two faculty members from the Department of Economics, Stuart Allen (department head) and Jeff Sarbaum, the lead content expert.
The game’s premise is that an alien craft crash-lands on a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Earth. In order to survive and create a prosperous society, the extraterrestrials must learn the basic principles of economics – from scarcity, savings, and investments to trade, foreign aid, and sustainable growth. The game covers the same concepts as the face-to-face micr'economics course at UNCG, but also integrates interdisciplinary concepts from history, ethics, math, biology, and anthropology.
It is a first-person, single-player game, which means that each student plays the same role – the alien leader. Communication among students is facilitated through blogging and within a built-in chat area. Because the content is built into game activities, the course d'es not have a textbook, though it d'es have a player’s manual.
There are several reasons for creating this course in a game format.
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