Rhetorical Argument
With help from ~FAST Tex, instructors from the Computer Writing and Research Lab customize a video game for teaching rhetoric.
When members of a work group from the Computer Writing and Research Lab (CWRL) had an idea to customize a video game to teach freshman-level rhetoric students, they came to DIIA for help in designing Rhetorical Peaks—a mystery-solving caper inspired by David Lynch’s Twin Peaks television series.
DIIA promotes collaboration in creating tools for teaching 21st century learners through its Faculty and Student Teams for Technology (~FAST Tex) program. Since 2001, tech-savvy students hired and trained by DIIA have provided technical support to faculty members integrating instructional technology in their courses. The recent ~FAST Tex partnership between DIIA and the CWRL, a component of the Division of Rhetoric and Writing, presents an exemplar of how such collaboration can enhance teaching to transform learning.
Rhetorical Peaks is a virtual town where someone has died under mysterious circumstances. Players must navigate around town, interacting with a number of characters to gather evidence to support a causal argument to explain the death and identify a suspect. The game presents several wrinkles along the way that challenge players to exercise basic rhetorical skills they’ve studied during the semester. The students’ biggest discovery of all should be that there exist several plausible arguments to explain the mystery.
Students complete the one-player game as homework or during a single class period. In engaging the mystery, students demonstrate their ability to critically analyze information, evaluate evidence, generate and support an argument, and attack a complex, open-ended problem.
In 2006, CWRL’s Game Design/Virtual Communities Workgroup began developing the game using the Aurora Toolset for modifying the Bioware role-playing game Neverwinter Nights. The tools empower users to manipulate terrain, characters, objects, and game play in Neverwinter Nights to fashion their own virtual spaces and interactive plots. The innovative approach of the CWRL instructors was to develop an interactive environment where students could practice rhetorical skills rather than simply receive content or design their own games. By presenting a module based on a murder mystery narrative, the developers sought to engage students through addictive game play, conversation with non-player characters, and adventures to collect evidence.
With support from ~FAST Tex student developers over a 12-week period in 2008, instructors used four well-known digital tools to create several prototypes of the Rhetorical Peaks simulation.
- PowerPoint: a traditional 2D presentation tool
- Adobe Flash: a 2D interactive media development tool
- Unity: an emerging 3D development tool
- Second Life: a 3D virtual world
The developers have found that Flash, Unity, and Second Life offer rich immersive capabilities. They see great promise in using multimedia interactive quest games to engage students in forms of literacy that may be new only to the classroom. The partnership between CWRL and DIIA will allow ongoing assessment of the best choices for and uses of simulation technology.