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ECON 201: A University Economics Course as an Online Computer Game
9/5/2006
- Students find games highly engaging and therefore voluntarily invest time in games. Research shows that student performance increases when learners are engaged, so it makes sense to adapt a medium that is intrinsically motivating for education. Learning d'esn’t have to be – and shouldn’t be – boring.
- We view gaming as a pedagogy, especially for the new digital generation. Well-designed games embed the elements of effective education: content, communication, interactivity, knowledge application, and assessment.
- Gaming is problem-based learning. The players encounter a problem – surviving in a hostile environment, solving a mystery, eluding a villain, etc. – and must resolve it. The problem drives the learning, which is far better than the typical classroom experiences: “teaching by telling and learning by listening.”
- Traditional courses seldom allow students to apply newly learned theory, but in ECON201 students must apply principles as part of the game play. Students first acquire new knowledge, then make decisions based on that knowledge, and finally respond to the consequences to advance in the game. Reinforcing content by using it to solve problems increases students’ understanding and retention of principles.
Through game-based analysis, practice, role-playing, application, and decision-making, students come to see economics as a way of thinking, which faculty member Jeff Sarbaum says is the ultimate goal of the course.
While developing this project, we faced two major challenges and a thousand minor ones. First, the content had to be re-conceptualized from a traditional format – lecture, readings, written assignments, case studies exams – into a game format. We accomplished this through ongoing brainstorming activities.
Project consultant Rod Riegle from Illinois State University gave us this fundamental guiding principle: “Don’t violate the game metaphor.” He meant we shouldn’t require students to exit the game in order to read a textbook or take a quiz; rather, all the elements of the educational experience had to be embedded within the game itself so the illusion of being in a synthetic micro-world was maintained. Integrating the fun of game-playing and the formal learning of academic problem-solving stretched everyone’s creativity.
Second, although our staff had produced award-winning online courses and small drop-in games, we had no experience creating a full-length, commercial-quality game. To develop the needed expertise, we expanded our permanent staff, reviewed commercial games, read scholarship on pedagogy and gaming, and hired gaming consultants and a dozen students and part-time staffers who were avid computer game players. In all, about thirty-five employees worked on the project.
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