Video Games Trickle From Rec Rooms to Classrooms
Through new breed of games, students explore topics from bacteria to Babylon.
High school senior Ian Lindfors navigated an underwater maze, bubbles rising as he passed beds of sea kelp. Rounding a corner, he saw the enemy and fired.
Except no sound came out as green “bullets” punctured Mr. Lindfors’ virtual foe—a blue cube on the screen of his school computer. So he quickly punched in some changes to the programming code controlling Bacteria Bash, the video game he was busy customizing during his second-period class. “I’m going to use a splash sound,” the 17-year-old declared.
Far from telling him to stop fooling around, teacher Paul J. Ackerman merely nodded in approval. “These kids are learning algebra without knowing it,” said Mr. Ackerman one morning last month, as he watched Mr. Lindfors and his classmates in one of several courses on video game design that he teaches at Edgewater High School...
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