Karen Campbell is a gamer. For readers who came of age in the predigital era, that means she spends a good deal of time playing computer games. Campbell, a senior linguistics major at Douglass College, also is an avid acquirer of languages – fluent German, passable Italian, a bit of French – with a serious academic interest in how computer games might be used in education.
Over the past year, her hobby and intellectual interest unexpectedly came together with the help of her German instructor, a casual remark at a conference, and a trip to Pennsylvania.
Last year, Campbell, who works at the Rutgers Language Institute, and Ursula Atkinson, senior program administrator at the institute and Campbell’s former German instructor, attended an online conference on gaming in education. During one of the sessions, Campbell heard a speaker say that The Sims, the strategic life simulation game, might be useful in language instruction. That was it, just a mention; but it stuck with Campbell, and when she and Atkinson visited Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, to trade ideas with their language lab counterparts there, she was intrigued when her host mentioned that Lafayette had installed The Sims 2 on their language lab computer in Spanish.
“You can do that in Spanish?” Campbell recalled asking. “And she [the Lafayette language lab director] said, ‘Sure, you just have to change the registry key number.’”
When they returned to Rutgers, Atkinson and Campbell decided to give The Sims 2 a try. “We bought four copies for use in the language lab," Atkinson said. “We gave workshops to the instructors and encouraged them to promote it to their students. Actually, Karen promoted it and gave workshops to the instructors.”
Among those instructors was Deena Levy, a doctoral candidate and an instructor of intermediate Italian, a newcomer to video gaming and The Sims 2. “The students have grown up with this technology, and they often play this game for fun,” she said, “so it’s a good way to build vocabulary.”
Myriam Alami, the French language coordinator, was an early convert, having attended a workshop given by Atkinson and Campbell in the fall. She assigned The Sims 2 game last fall as an extra-credit project in all her French classes – elementary through intermediate levels. “Students spent more than the 15 required hours in the language lab working on this project, and at the end of the semester they turned in their Sims paper, which included a narrative part about the virtual family they created, pictures of the characters, their house, and a scenario that simulates everyday life, Alami said. “I was very pleased with the results. The papers were very original.”
For the more advanced classes, the assignment is more specific. Alami requires the students to build their virtual scenarios around a theme that had been covered in class. Jessica Larmony, a sophomore from Perth Amboy, chose health – la santé.
“I took pictures of the sims (as gamers call the characters they create) eating and of their typical day-to-day activities – anything that had to do with health,” said Larmony, a double major in French and communications. She then used the pictures to create a PowerPoint presentation, to which she added various effects. “Overall, I had a good time, especially considering I’d never played this game before, and learning to do it in French was a bit of a challenge,” Larmony said.
Language students can now play The Sims 2 in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and traditional and simplified Chinese. For beginners, the game comes with an English tutorial, but, aside from that tutorial, one cannot play the game in English. More languages might be made available in the future, Atkinson said.
As for Campbell, she has been working part time for Rutgers’ Office of Instructional and Research Technology and hopes to continue her work in instructional technology when she graduates this spring. She expects that part of her job will be finding ways to put computer games to work as instructional tools.