One of the country’s most prestigious universities is offering a video games course as part of a shocking $40,000-a-year curriculum.
The University of California (UC), Berkeley will launch a course called “The Art of Fighting Games” for the spring 2024 curriculum, which aims to make students better at video games.
The class will focus on the Japanese video game “Street Fighter III 3rd Strike,” with homework assignments where students actually record themselves playing the game, according to the class syllabus.
University of California Berkeley Offers a Course in ‘The Art of Fighting Games’
No prerequisites are required and students are not graded based on their performance.
UC Berkeley bills the class as an “introduction to fighting games, aimed at those with less than 100 hours in the genre,” but the university does not explain how the class could help students enter and succeed in life after college.
Registration runs through Jan. 24, and the university has encouraged students to sign up, saying, “All you need is the willingness to learn and fail!”
The university continues to explain that students are assessed on their “grets, commitment to improvement and dedication to course assignments.”
Classes are split into two 90-minute segments, beginning with a lecture and ending with a laboratory discussing Japanese stereotypes in character design, the origins of Japanese and American interactions, and the “social economics behind design decisions and work culture in the Japanese.” . media industry,” the syllabus reads.
The college appears to validate the course, saying it is “designed to serve as a gateway to understanding modern Japanese culture and will provide students with a way to engage with Japanese history and even the Japanese language.”
Students must play the video game against each other in a ‘Swiss-style’ tournament
The syllabus for ‘The Art of Fighting Games’ says it will focus on Japanese video game and arcade culture
UC Berkeley claims students will be ‘more proficient at the basics of a fighting game’
For exams, students compete against each other in a ‘Swiss-style tournament’ of the Street Fighter game and must save the replay, give a presentation on the player’s background and analyze the fighting style they used during the competition.
“At the end of this course, you will be more proficient in the basics of a fighting game and more knowledgeable about the genre in general,” the course reads place.
The site further explained that this is “in addition to gaining a more informed understanding of how modern Japanese media culture came to be.”
Some colleges are now adding classes that focus on topics like Taylor Swift, which could take away from the prestige of having a college degree.
The new UC Berkeley class comes as reports show students are not learning the same way they were before the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the answer might be for teachers to focus on learning the material instead of focusing on typical assessment methods.
“When classes are structured as learning laboratories… and students are not punished for exploring new methods, making mistakes, asking questions or admitting failure, they become more creative and self-directed,” says Gerald E. Knesek, senior lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. School of Management at the University of Michigan-Flint, wrote in 2022 Harvard Business Op-ed.
“They seem to open up and thrive when asked to write one-page reflections and implication papers about what the concepts or materials mean to them,” he said.
Knesek went on to explain that he applied this grading style in his own classes and found that “… students seem to be having fun while working on classroom exercises and participating in active discussions about the topic presented.”
Knesek said he believes this type of education will restore students’ love of learning, saying, “It’s time for the entire education system to reexamine our current assessment paradigm.”