April 10, 2010: Level Up For Your Degree!

Jesse Schell’s great talk at DICE calls out Lee Sheldon, an assistant professor at Indiana University. Specifically, for his Multiplayer Game Design class last year, Lee skipped grades during the course, and gave out experience points. Students leveled up, with an "A" being Level 12 at the end of the semester.

From the syllabus:
Class time will be divided between fighting monsters (Quizzes, Exams etc.), completing quests (Presentations of Games, Research etc.) and crafting (Personal Game Premises, Game Analysis Papers, Video Game Concept Document etc.).

Reportedly, class attendance and scores were up significantly. Not at all surprising to me -- after all, the current college generation has been trained to accept these tropes as both entertaining and rewarding.

-- Paul Chapman