raydeen
Terracotta Army
Posts: 1246
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This one was sort've a toughie to pigeon-hole, but I figured it belonged here rather than in the gaming discussion.
I’m an instructional assistant at a vo-tech school and work primarily with the computer related shops. Myself and the Computer Information Systems teacher (who is also a relative on the wife’s side) ran an interesting experiment this week. The next marking period is going to involve programming (C++, Java, etc.) and we thought it would be a good idea to give the students a ‘logic test’. We were sitting at one of the local clubs brainstorming and getting generally blitzed when I hit upon a novel idea. Kids love games. But these kids have been weaned on a diet of modern games. Weapons of choice in the CIS classroom are WC3, WoW, Call of Duty, the new Warhammer game, UT2k4, etc. Games that don’t involve a huge amount of thinking. Skill, yes. Reflexes, yes. Thinking, no. So my preposal was this: Take these kids back to the beginning. Make them play the old Infocom text adventures. Make them think, and get that gray matter churnin’ and burnin’. We began by telling the students that within a week they would all be taking a logic test on the computer and that they should get everything they wanted/needed off the hard drive as there was a pretty good chance the drives might be wiped in preparation for the test. We were going to go with the granddaddy of ‘em all, Zork. But a couple of the kids had played it before, and we wanted a level playing field. Next choice was going to be Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but one kid got it in his head that that was going to be the game (due to the upcoming movie adaptation) and began playing it on his own. So we decided to go with the little known gems from that time period. Planetfall, Infidel, and Suspended. Games we were quite sure none of the kids had ever played.
We had them choose up teams, 2 per team, with the caveat that those teams might be switched around a bit near the end of the 3 day test. That way, at some point, they may be forced to work with someone that they didn’t necessarily like or work well with, but would have to learn too work with in order to obtain a good score. Scores were dependent on the scores from the games, and the ability to troubleshoot and repair any or all of 4 computers at the back of the classroom. The smart teams had one kid at the game and one at the repair area. After they successfully repaired a machine, they had to come up with a new devious problem that the next victim…er, student had to repair.
The night before the test, we wiped the lab, formatted with DOS, and created a basic autoexec that would load the game as soon as the comp was rebooted. We downloaded some fun videos to show the kids the following day as part of the intro to the test (Hey Hey 16k, MAME Jump, All Your Base), which the teacher used to introduce the kids to what it was like in the old days and how the game programming industry pretty much left America for a time. After about a half hour of ‘lecture’, the kids were allowed into the computer lab. Needless to say, they were shocked. I don’t think any of them had ever really seen a computer game, let alone a computer without any sort of graphics or user interface. We gave them some basic instructions on how to interact with the game and turned ‘em loose. Here was the big surprise for us. I fully expected to see about 1/3 get really into it, another 1/3 or so sort’ve give a collected ‘meh’ but plough through it and eventually get hooked, and the final 1/3 say ‘This is the suxx0r!!11!!1’ and pretty much sit around and do nothing. Surprise. They loved it. Every last one of them. It took them a while to get the hang of recognizing when to save their game and how to communicate properly with the parser but at the end of the first day, most had all gotten to the same place. And they did it working together and had tons of fun doing it. There was bursts of laughter and anger from every quarter, the best being when Floyd the robot in Planetfall ran off with one team’s inventory. They shrieked with rage then damn near fell on the floor splitting their sides. Everyone was oblivious to the outside world that day, so wrapped in the game they were. And it was hot. Bloody hot. I was expecting the kids to be complaining. Nope. No one noticed. Until maybe the end of the class when they came out of the game.
The next day was Infidel, and today was Suspended. We were going to just use one game for the 3 day period, but then felt that some would have too great of an advantage if they could go home and download a walkthrough, and then come in the next day and zoom ahead of those that maybe didn’t have a computer of net access.
All in all, it was a grand experiment. And the one thing that impressed me as a great life lesson was the very beginning of the game Planetfall. You start the game off with a very clear instruction. If you stick with the duty your assigned, you get off the ship and live. If you choose to shirk your duty and dismiss authority, you don’t get off the ship and you die. So maybe for once they all have learned to do as they’re told. OR ELSE!!!!!
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