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Old 05-08-2002, 04:04 PM   #6
Molly
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Sweden
Home MUD: 4 Dimensions
Posts: 574
Molly will become famous soon enoughMolly will become famous soon enough
If your idea is teaching a class in for instance logic or ecology by using a mud or other Multi User environment, I suppose this might raise the interest for the subject considerably. Perhaps more than desireable, the risk is obvious of the pupils going off on a tangent and starting to play the mud for fun. losing sight of the purpose. :-)

But it could be done rather easily. It would of course need a close cooperation between the pedagogue and the mud operator, but the tools are all there. No need to create a specific code for it, as Ashon stated you could use pretty stock code. What you'd need would be a system of pretty advanced scripts to make it interactive, so probably Circle would be a better codebase than Diku, since the DG_scripts are a lot more versatile than the mob_progs in Diku.

In our mud we already have tendencies in the educatory direction, the entire Pre Historic Dimension is based on the map of the Mediterranean area around 2000 BC. There are a number of built-in Quests based on authentic old myths, which need both logic and some knowledge of the mythology to solve. (The myths can be found written down on scrolls in different places in the zones, since we don't really expect our players to do research on internet). :-)

The quests are set up in several steps, where you need to solve one step first to get access to the next. The information needed for the solution can be found in different forms, all over the zones, so you have to travel around quite a bit to get it. Each time you solve a part of a Quest, you get some sort of reward, usually a bonus of experience points (the amount is based on the level of the player and/or the difficulty of the quest). You also get some piece of information that you need to get started on the next step. If you do things in the wrong order, there will be no input at all, so there is no way of solving the final quests without going through all the steps first.

This system could very easily be adapted to educationary purposes, but I guess the Diku and Cirle licence would prevent any commersial use.
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