Edie Glaser, Dan Bayer and Francesca Italiano are collaborating with students to develop an immersive electronic game for beginning Italian classes.
Photo credit: Phil Channing
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Italiano Virtuale
Interactive game provides powerful context for learning
By Kirsten Holguin
February 2006
Sitting in a small caffeteria in Milan, Italy, the first-year Italian
language student finishes her cappuccino. Only when she gets the conto
does she realize she doesn’t have enough euros to pay.
Luckily, the USC College student knows just what to do. With just a few
clicks of a mouse, she takes a quiz, aces it, and watches as virtual
money fills the account on the screen in front of her. That, of course,
is the beauty of a video game.
Thanks to the Virtual Italian Experience (VIE) video game now in
development at the USC College Language Center, students will soon be
able to regularly take such computer-generated trips to Italy without
leaving campus. As players progress from a classroom on the University
Park campus to a tour of Italy, the game is designed to engage students
and enrich their learning of language and culture.
“The game speaks to every type of learning style and that’s what I like
most about it,” said Edie Glaser, VIE project manager and Language
Center administrative manager who first envisioned the game.
The VIE game, now 25 percent complete, also marks what may be a first
in the use of creative technologies to improve college language
instruction. To her knowledge, Glaser said, USC is the first to develop
a virtual learning environment for use in a foreign language
curriculum.
“I knew first-year language classes at USC teach language through
role-playing, and role-playing is central to video games. I thought if
there was some way to merge the language pedagogy with video game
technology, then we would have something no one else was doing, and it
would be an effective learning tool,” said Glaser.
Students playing the game assume a character in the virtual world. With
the virtual money earned from quizzes, students must buy specific items
in order to progress in the game. A “Visitor’s Guide” explains cultural
differences between Italy and the United States, which the students are
quizzed on in later scenes. Through Web-based reporting, instructors
can monitor student performance, allowing them to adjust their class
lessons to spend more time on students’ problem areas.
Through a number of features, the game emphasizes intricate linguistic
skills along with cultural awareness. The creators hope that after
playing the game students will be able to discuss Italian politics and
Italy’s role in Europe, talk about contemporary Italian society and
discuss the Italian diaspora around the world.
Good Timing
At about the same time that Glaser first envisioned the plan for VIE,
Francesca Italiano, director of the College’s Italian language program,
completed writing the beginning Italian textbook, Allegro! Her first
textbook, Crescendo! (Heinle, 1994), has been the most widely used
intermediate Italian text in the English-speaking world.
“Some people might not understand that there are limited resources such
as high quality Italian textbooks and workbooks available
commercially,” said Italiano. What made Italiano’s first book
especially successful was its incorporation of Italian culture and
experience into its language instruction, something she also did in
Allegro!, which is due out in fall 2006.
In 2002, Italiano began working with Glaser and Dan Bayer, executive
director of the Language Center, agreeing to use the content in
Allegro! for VIE. In short order, Glaser hired a graduate screenwriting
student from the School of Cinema-Television, an avid gamer and
computer science student from the Viterbi School of Engineering and a
native Italian teacher, Paola Matteucci, from the College to work on
the project.
A screenshot from the game shows a classroom in VKC.
Image courtesy: USC College Language Center
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Since then, a number of students have taken part in designing the game.
College graduate student Brooke Carlson is one. After learning Italian
and studying in Verona as part of his coursework, he now helps the VIE
team with programming, entering XML code into a Flash interface, and
adding content to the grammar section. Recent USC College graduate
Patrick Reynolds is the backbone of the Flash design and programming.
The VIE team has not simply transferred Allegro! into an electronic form.
“We have personalized activities for students including authentic
cultural situations, realistic visual worlds and real-life tasks to
motivate students to acquire linguistic skills needed to be able to
connect and communicate,” said Italiano, who reviews and approves all
game scripts to ensure high quality.
In Development
With funding from a 2-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
grant, the VIE team plans to complete the game by June 2007.
Getting the NEH grant was a long shot, but vindicated the team’s efforts, Bayer said.
“Language programs do not usually receive grants from the NEH, but our
proposal showed how the game combined with classroom experience will
advance learning about contemporary Italian culture and society,” he
said.
Bayer estimated that it would have cost about $1 million for a software
company to create a game like VIE. The Language Center developed
the interactive concept outline for VIE for one-tenth of that amount,
he said.
Linking new technologies with foreign language teaching and learning
has been a key aim of the USC College Language Center since it opened
in 1997. In 1999, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, Bayer oversaw an effort to integrate technology into
language curricula with online video labs, audio streaming and
activities that require students to visit Web sites in the target
language. Now, students have online access to audio, video and workbook
lessons in eight languages.
“Anything that did not need to be done in the classroom was taken out
and put into an electronic online version,” said Bayer. “The change
means time can be spent more efficiently in the classroom interacting
in the language and learning the culture with classmates and the
teacher.”
This spring, students, staff and faculty with backgrounds in Italian,
3-D modeling, animation and video game design are pitching in to help
develop and beta test VIE.
When the game is finished in 2007, Prentice-Hall has first right of
refusal to publish and market VIE to universities across the country.
USC students will always have free access to the Virtual Italian
Experience. Italian students will be able to connect to the game via a
downloadable application.
“At USC College, we want to make the learning experiences of our
students as meaningful as possible. Sometimes this means looking in
unexpected places for solutions,” Bayer said.
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