When I was a teenager in the early 1980s, I realized the potential of using video games in education. The same high school classmates who couldn’t pass a test at school could somehow remember what potion or scroll to use to tame dozens of kinds of monsters in video games that they loved, like “Dungeons and Dragons” and “Rogue.”
A couple of decades later, as a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, I became frustrated by teaching poorly attended classes. As many as 300 students had signed up to attend my lectures, but only half regularly showed up for class.
