With the development of the times, video games that were once labeled as “electronic heroin” have long been rectified by more and more people and organizations. While many esports events have been forced to cancel or move from offline to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we recently had another piece of good news. Through a new partnership with the University of Arizona’s history department, students taking online courses will also be able to earn credits through the educational and entertaining game Age of Empires IV.
Specifically, this degree credit is available through the University of Arizona’s Illuminated History Experience, which is open to the school’s current and future in-person/online student population.
Through the experience of the “special extracurricular education content” provided in the game, Microsoft and the History Department of the University of Arizona were able to let students feel the magnificent history more immersed in a vivid and intuitive form.
It is reported that the course was jointly created by Paul Milliman, associate professor of medieval history, and Alison Futrell, associate professor and head of Roman history, and both showed great enthusiasm in interviews with Microsoft.
Milliman said:
Many of the top students I’ve worked with in recent years have been gamers. While experiencing these historical events in the game, they are also engaged in academic research on historical events.
With that in mind, we’d love to have ‘game historians’ witness and understand the factors that change history, and show them some great places to do historical research on computers and the web.
As Age of Empires IV says, I want to teach them ‘how to make history part of their story’.
Futrell expressed a similar sentiment:
As a former archaeologist, I appreciate Microsoft’s dynamic presentation in Age of Empires IV. Players can witness a more tangible and in-depth history during the game. We have a lot of ways to find out what’s going on, and in this particular class, we’ve also added different types of challenges to enhance that part of what some players have already experienced.
Finally, Neowin news editor Pulasthi Ariyasinghe also gave the game a high score of 9/10. It remains to be seen how effective this curriculum experiment will be (whether it will increase student interest and engagement).