I saw “Intellagirl” Sarah Robbins give a keynote on Friday at the LHRIC Tech Expo and she spoke a lot about gaming, how the millennials learn, and how games may offer a glimpse at new ways to engage students in schools. As far as I’m concerned, no new news there – I’ve been a gamer myself for some time and am well aware of how cognitively challenging games can be, and I’ve read James Gee and many of the others.
Then today I stumbled across Blizzard’s creative writing contest, in which entrants will submit stories that take place in the virtual worlds of Blizzard’s computer games. Looking at this, I see even more clearly that the things we have to force kids to do in schools are things they might otherwise do willingly if given the chance to do so in ways that are meaningful to them. Many students read and write fan fiction. Why is it so hard to get them to write a five-paragraph essay of any quality? They are enthusiastic about writing a story in a virtual world but not one that takes place in the “real” world of school. Are we to assume then that the “real” world of school is so far removed from reality as to be completely foreign and uninteresting to them, even less so than the made-up world of Azeroth?