Neverwinter Nights in the Classroom

This article explores the potential role of educational games in the classroom. According to the article, the gaming-as-learning movement is motivated by an observation that college students today learn in different ways than preceding generations. Current research by cognitive learning theorists, psychologists, neurologists, and biologists is beginning to show the ability of today's students to naturally "multitask" while learning - absorbing information from multiple sources simultaneously.

The "Neverwinter Nights (NWN)" project was created at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (SJMC) at the University of Minnesota in the United States, to experiment with the efficacy of computer simulations as education tools. Manufactured by Canadian gaming company BioWare, NWN is a "Dungeons and Dragons"-type game set in a medieval fantasy world. NWN is sold along with a game-building toolset that allows users to modify the game. For the media course, the fantasy world was replaced by a modern world of a small American city called Harperville, with news editors, reporters, and other characters.

In the modified game, the student plays the role of a rookie reporter at the Harperville Gazette covering a train accident. In the game, the reporter talks to the paper's editor about a good angle for a story. Once players choose their story angle, they are free to go anywhere in the newsroom and anywhere in the city of Harperville to research the story. The online 'news library' was filled with hundreds of pages of documents and sources from online sites, and dozens of characters can be interviewed by the rookie reporter, including hospital employees, railroad executives and workers, city hall and emergency management personnel, university experts, and business people. As students move through the information-seeking process, they take notes in a reporter's notebook within the game. They then "file" their story, get a printout of their reporter's notebook, and write a 1,000-word news story with the information they've gathered. A class instructor has access to the log of each student's movements through the game; students must also turn in their reporter's notebook and their stories so she can see the type of notes taken by each student, and how those notes were used in generating each story.

The article concludes that "this project is showing us that games can be much more a way for students to pass the time-that they can be an engaging and effective way to teach and learn."