Can you tell I’m researching games in education this morning? I’ve actually known about this project for quite some time but I keep forgetting to blog about it. The Education Arcade is using the Neverwinter Nights game engine, originally constructed to play Dungeons and Dragons online with friends or at home solo, to build a mockup of a North American community during the dawn of the Revolutionary War. Students will be able to role play their way through a simulation of society at that period in time. This is just absolutely brilliant. I could have almost directly applied this work to coursework at Bowdoin – we had an instructor who taught a course in revolutionary france and he would have his students role play being members of french society at that time (aristocracy, the petit bourgeoisie and so on) using a threaded discussion board. Imagine the horizons this would have opened up.

There’s a big grant just screaming to be written here building off of this work. What if I built a larger scale version of this, 100’s of players at once. In simple terms this kind of project can be the textbook of the modern age. Read about the french revolution? Yeah that’s important, but I can BE the french revolution. Which do you think will stick in the kid’s heads, today’s kids, raised on interactivity?

I need to get my doctorate. Not that this is insight on my part, as the link clearly indicates there are many others working on this stuff, but there’s vast opportunity here for me to do the kinds of things I love doing, right as these kinds of projects are starting to take off.