Reading, writing and playing - Rochester Institute of Technology

Reading, writing & playing: JUST PRESS PLAY
JUST PRESS
PLAY
New game pushes
students out of
their comfort zones
First-year student Katie Tigue shows off the achievement cards she earned in Just
Press Play. “I have so many upperclassman friends now. It’s a great way to meet older
students,” she says. (Photo by A. Sue Weisler)
When Andrew Phelps became
head of the School of Interactive
Games and Media, he began to
meet with the 10 percent of first-year students
on the verge of dropping out of
the program.
As a professor who worked with upperlevel
classes, he hadn’t had much interaction
with students who had stopped attending
classes. But as an administrator, he
started thinking about why one group
thrived and the other failed. The answer
wasn’t intelligence.
“One of the things I noticed about the
group in those senior classes is that they had
already built networks of support,” Phelps
says. “They had already figured out the system
of being here. They knew how to survive
various kinds of things.”
The challenge became how could faculty,
staff and administrators encourage these successful
behaviors in low-performing students
while at the same time reward high-achieving
students, who wanted recognition for being
what they called “awesome.”
The answer, not surprisingly from a group
of game designers, was Just Press Play.
More than 400 undergraduates in the
School of Interactive Games and Media in
the B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing
and Information Sciences are playing the
Web-based game, which launched last fall
with the help of a $350,000 gift from Microsoft
Corp.
The game is like a scavenger hunt where
students earn achievements for everything
from finding
a professor’s
office
to visiting a
restaurant,
exploring a
new part of
campus or
attending
a lecture. The game has nothing to do with
grades or class credit and can be played by
students during their entire career at RIT, and
even after they graduate.
“What games tend to be really good at is
giving you a big-picture view of things, how
things fit together and the milestones along
the way,” says Elizabeth Lawley, professor of
interactive games and media and head of pro-
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