Myst as Educational Tool

The BBC reports on Tim Rylands, an award-winning teacher in the UK who uses a laptop, a projector, and Myst, one of the best-selling games of all time, to engage his students:

"Children are swamped by high quality visual images all the time. My job is to give them the visual literacy skills to explain to them what it is they are watching."

Equipping them with a visual language means they gain a healthy respect, says Tim, for the skills and effort put into creating such landscapes.

Some computer games take children and adults into other worlds
They are also the types of critical skills that 21st Century grown-ups increasingly have to rely on. The experience spawns a group of articulate children who have become critical of other games which fail to live up to their expectations.

...

The national average attainment of Level Four literacy levels for that age group is 75%. At [Rylands' school], the number attaining Level Four have shot up from 76.5% in 2000 to 93% in 2004.

What is more convincing is the level of achievement for boys. The national average for Level Four achievement has stayed at 70% between 2000 and 2004. At Tim's school, the figure has gone from 66.7% to a full marks score of 100%.

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