gnunn
A couple of recent events in my professional life have gotten me thinking about the relationship between games... specifically RPGs and learning.
A while back, while at work, one of my coworkers asked me If I knew how to do some bit of fancy formatting in Excel. I did... and then I realized that the reason I did, was because I first learned how to do it when creating an electronic spellbook for my Wizard character for one of the campaigns I'm currently a part of.
Then, two weeks ago, at a departmental meeting, one of my coworkers announced that we were building a wiki to compile our department's knowledge database! The wiki at work uses Wikitext, rather than Textile, but there are many similarities between the language and the one used on Obsidian Portal, so I have been able to quickly come up with effective formatting for the pages and have started transferring process documents from our old system to the new wiki.
One of my players is a teacher at an alternative ed school here in Seattle and she regularly plays Magic The Gathering with her kids (mostly as a reward, rather than a lesson)... and used to do weekly recaps of our D&D sessions when she taught a slightly older group. She was even thinking about setting up a D&D club for after school, because her kids were so interested in it.
Do any of you have similar experience of gaming contributing to real-world learning? If you game with your kids, has it influenced math, problem-solving or storytelling skills?
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The very next weekend after restoring the PC, my roommate was playing warcraft and, instead of shutting it down properly like I sternly requested, just hit the power button. That was unwise on those old PCs. The power supply blew out and wiped out the harddrive as well. I had to buy a new power supply and drive and install them myself. Step 2 complete, I now knew how to fix hardware. Then step 3, I got even better at windows through installing it a second time in a week.
Later I became a coder on a MUD and learned to code in C. That little bit of coding knowledge spread to html, vbscript, javascript, etc., and I got a job in IT support. That job led to a little coding and then xml exposure which led to my next (lucrative) job in e-procurement.
All this because I wanted to play games on my computer.
Like Onsilius, I learned how to install/uninstall windows because I wanted to play games on the computer.
Oh, and I was forgetting this: I learned how to talk for hours (to someone who doesn't know anything about D&D or RPGs in general) in complicated ways just to look smart, without actually saying anything really... hahaha. All that thanks to improvisation skills acquired while playing games :P