Don't Knock the Aztecs

A student came to my office utmost calendar week and asked for help setting up a LAN game of Civ IV in matchless of the college's computer labs. He was releas to play my Age of Conquest stylish scenario with some friends that afternoon. While I showed him in the fare how to set raised a multiplayer unfit, he shared his scheme to diddle Spain and attack the Aztecs. It's a bad idea.

Most masses think Cortés was able to shoot down Montezuma because of superior weaponry and technology. At best, that's an oversimplification. The Aztecs were far more advanced than most mass realize, and their population numbers were astounding for the time period. The working capital of Tenochtitlan had an estimated 250,000 people – five times the population of the largest cities in Europe at the sentence.

Cortés was able to conquer the Aztecs because of two factors that aren't present in the plot. The first was disease. The second was Montezuma's belief that the appearance of Cortés was a sign that conspicuous the beginning of the Aztec Empire's end of the world. Without the benefit of these factors, my pupil and his Spanish civilization would face a crushing get the better of and lose the adventure to gain a foothold in the Americas.

I know this because I spent almost six weeks researching European Economic Community and Central America in the time of Cristoforo Colombo to make over the scenario for a class called "Imperium." Population numbers for all major cities in Europe and Central America, John Roy Major informative and cultural centers connected each continent, diplomatic, technological and military strengths and weaknesses of the time are all diagrammatical in the mod and cited in the readme single file.

For the assort, students had to spiel the game in addition to their readings and discuss whether the scenario accurately represented the period. One of the key concepts students should make learned about was the persona of belief systems arsenic described in the book "The Conquest of America: The Question of the Unusual." In essence, the book and the courageous make the same argument: Had the Aztecs viewed the world other than, their clash with the European nation conquistadors would take over been radically several.

Employing videogames in the curriculum at Dickinson College is a relatively recent development. Information technology was only a a couple of eld ago when I began reading academics such as James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins and Bryan Alexander WHO talk over the teaching potential of games.

Even and so, we were slow to take up. It's one thing to point to pedagogical principles in a game, but consolidation into a course is a undiversified different question. Most computer games take hours to learn and even longer to play finished. To justify so much an investiture in time, a game would not only have to match the content of the course, but bring home the bacon a eruditeness experience that couldn't be accomplished through reading, authorship and class discussion.

The first game that showed great promise was the international release of The Sims Online. We had already begun setting awake language exchanges for our foreign language classes with aboriginal speakers abroad using Skype. Students enjoyed being able to implement what they'd scholarly in class that week while coming together interesting people from around the world. In turn on, they would so help them with their English.

The Sims Online promised to aim these kinds of exchanges to a new level. Not only could they converse with native speakers online, but they could cause so in an environment with activities that mimicked those in the very existence and pleased multiethnic interaction. It almost seemed as well good to live true.

Alas, IT was. The game itself was a complete floating-point operation. Sales in the U.S. were disappointing, and the biz's Continent departure was deferred several multiplication before at long last being canceled.

We never ended up using The Sims Online, but it did lead me to check over shipway to set the conformation files of other games to only play in certain languages. I still hadn't mentation of a way to use up them in a class, but I liked the idea of students playing The Sims 2, Limbo or Neverwinter Nights II in a foreign language in the science lab. Every semester since then, we've purchased a hardly a games and installed them along with a little script that asks the instrumentalist to prefer a foreign language from a list before the game launches.

The first class to practice a videogame A division of the course was German 101. I had been asked to Blackbeard the run in the fall as an adjunct instructor. It was an funny chance for Maine to showcase the use of a recently technology as part of a class. I immediately began looking at the instructional potential of MMOGs.

The key benefit of an MMOG was its latent to create an immersive lyric experience. That meant the pun had to be popular enough for the developers to emcee servers that were language proper.

The only game that fit the criteria was World of Warcraft. In some shipway, it seemed the like a bad match. German 101 has chapters on parts of the house, university animation and house. I couldn't find many quests that would make very good chapter lessons.

In a more abstract horse sense, though, IT was perfect. All speech communication teacher has read articles and books that extol the benefits of creating a student-centered, cooperative and task-oriented classroom. The melodic theme was that students would be more motivated and keep more if they could apply their spoken language skills in a meaningful way. WoW certainly matched that description, but I was far from careful it was a good idea. And then I decided to let the students take: They could either behave a nomenclature substitution once a week with a student in Germany or play WoW with me on a German waiter.

Close to half the class opted for WoW. We were a little large to form a group, which made some tasks a bit more complicated than others. Since I didn't have the courage to ask the college to host a TeamSpeak waiter, we ended up using Skype. For each session, everyone would meet at a designated spot in world. Then we'd read some quests in collaboration and set out.

The gameplay itself was frequently chaotic. Imagine your usual conversations in WoW, take away the group functions and limit everyone's vocabulary to it of a 3-year-old, and you get the idea.

But despite the topsy-turvyness, there were real benefits that came from using the game. In addition to the extra hr of speaking and reading in German each calendar week, the students created a cheat sheet on their have of over 100 speech they thought they'd need for future sessions. They were heartbeat experts on the command tense. They devoured the list of verbs for the emotes, and or s incomplete of them played the game on their own for a couple of hours hebdomadally.

Scorn the extra work, I well thought out the crippled a winner. The power to immerse students in a situation made the game unique. Communicating in German became a skill they needed to succeed. Their concentration for that minute in WoW was absolute, and they were willing to expend extra time outside of class as symptomless. It was every teacher's dream.

Flush with success, I started looking around for other games that could ply the corresponding benefits in other courses. Story and semipolitical science seemed care the most potential candidates. Past the following semester, I had enough games for a faculty workshop. I came prepared to exhibit several games including Rome: Total Warfare, the mod Rome Total Realism, Civ Foursome, A Force More Powerful and PeaceMaker.

Unfortunately, after 15 transactions of ready, I was still the only one to show up. I was getting ready to go family when a new politics professor arrived. He didn't even need to hear the pitch. He was already active in severally politically oriented online games that I hadn't heard of, including Cyber Nations and NationStates, and he was eager to discuss slipway to use games in his classes.

Since then, we've offered quintuplet or six courses each semester that integrate games somehow. PeaceMaker is the most popular, but we've also put-upon Go bad Gilde 2, Civ IV, Fold It and some games happening the Japanese Wii. This semester, we had students make up their own games for the first time as well exploitation Inform 7.

I'll unremarkably see a couple students during the day playacting a mettlesome in one of the labs. About come in the evenings afterward I've left for home. Some play just for amusing, others as one of their assignments. The best part is I can't tell.

Last week I heard a student complain that my Civ IV mod was unworkable. "It's possible," I said. "If you want to succeed, you should train the course happening empires."

Todd Bryant is the Instructional Media Amou for the foreign spoken communication departments at Emily Dickinson College. You bum say his blog at Linux.Emily Dickinson.edu/wpmu/languages.

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