educational games bite back

a lovely story on how teachers created a NWN module that is educational and tests students on english and math etc. And since they did craft a story the students want to get to the end of, it works!
I particularly loved that quote:

“They would come knocking on the staff room door and wouldn’t let us go until we had taught them how to calculate area.“

beautiful :D

That’s how you really learn things, when you want to understand in order to achieve something, not because it is arbitrarily forced down your throat with the idea that “you must learn it because it will be useful later”. If it will be useful later why not start by putting a real useful problem or task in front of the pupils, let them bang their head on it a while, then give them the tools to solve it, which they will want to learn at that point. That’s exactly what a game does.

Anyway, the story is under http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/6254989.stm