Lee Sheldon, LL&C Associate Professor and Co-Director of Rensselaer's Program in Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences, has been recognized nationally and internationally for his transformation of the traditional classroom into a game-like learning environment. As profiled in Forbes magazine, "Sheldon writes and designs video games, but right now he's most famous for how he teaches his students: like they're playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game. He divides the class into small groups called 'guilds,' which complete quests such as taking tests and making presentations to earn points and then advance to a new level. At the end of the course, he determines the grade by points and skill level. Ever since he turned education into a game, he says, 'the average letter grade in the class went from a C to a B, and attendance is almost perfect.'"

For more of this story, see http://blogs.forbes.com/michaelnoer/2011/08/03/top-colleges-shapiro/.

For more about how to transform your classroom into a game, see Lee Sheldon, The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game (Course Technology, 2012), available at major booksellers.