Latin in LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online)

[Roger Travis]

Over the past couple months, I've managed to convince several of my Connecticut latin-teaching colleagues to play "The Lord of the Rings Online" (LOTRO) with me, partly as an adjunct to the Living Epic and Gaming Homer courses I started teaching in January (cf. my blog, Living Epic and the Video Games and Human Values Initiative; UConn also did a fun little video about my course).

Being, all of us, believers in the amazing power of situated learning, we're now starting to hatch a plan for teaching classics in-game in LOTRO. Our early notion is to have Latin-teachers lead groups through Latin lessons in-game, with chat (both voice and text) in Latin, to illustrate and above all to situate those lessons, according to lesson-plans designed around the story of the game. Students would also complete exercises, in the way of homework, online on their own schedules between in-game lessons.

I'd love to hear from you if you're interested in helping us shape this idea, and if you happen to know of any efforts that overlap with ours.

[Jocelyn Demuth]

I teach the Aeneid through old fashioned D+D role playing games in my Latin I class. Students create heroes, go through similar adventures to Aeneas "sail" to a new land and occassionally need to importune the gods for help. They must of course write to the gods in Latin and the gods can be fickle and rather unpredictable in their response. It's a big hit. In my Latin AP class, we are currently filming a Latin version of Dominus Anulorum. It's exhausting but a lot of fun.