In a paper published in Profession, the Modern Language Association's journal about modern languages and literatures, a Saint Louis University professor discusses how he uses video games to teach Italian, allowing his students to master two semesters worth of language acquisition through one intensive class for students new to the Italian language.
[...] Though [Simone] Bregni has used Final Fantasy, Trivial Pursuit, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, Heavy Rain and Rise of the Tomb Raider in his classrooms, one of the most useful games to teach Italian is Assassin's Creed II.
"In my Italian Renaissance literature course, for example, students explore Florence as it flourished under the Medici by playing Assassin's Creed II," Bregni says in the paper. "My 21st-century American students partake in the life of Ezio Auditore, a 20-something man from an affluent family, by wandering around a cultural and historical re-creation of 1476 Florence."
[...] In a class called Intensive Italian for Gamers, all students made progress equal to two semesters of Italian over the course of a single fall semester. By the final, students were 3 to 5 points ahead of students in a traditional Italian course.
Source: https://www.slu.edu/news/2018/april/learning-italian-through-gaming.php
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 24 2018, @06:58PM
Perhaps the darker, more sinister truth could be that movie violence over the decades has subtly and gradually desensitized its viewing populations to guns and military action. Even the censors seem to tolerate more graphic violence nowadays than say, 30 years ago for a given rating. If I don my tinfoil hat I could say maybe it's by design. How far it actually works to influence people's politics is another question. I'm not sure how that could even be tested. How would you find a good control group? All viewers who claim to avoid violent media? But then how do you show cause and effect? They could all be born lifelong pacifists.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?