Students were skipping my astrophysics class to play video games – so I turned the class itself into a video game

With college students less likely to read through a full textbook than they once were, video games can help keep them engaged.

By: Jane Charlton, Penn State, The Conversation

Outlets: The Conversation

Published: April 1, 2026

Words: 1,022

Last Updated: 4 months ago

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By Jane Charlton, Penn State

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 …

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