---
title: Terps Press Play on a Unique Learning Experience
date: 2025-04-28T05:30:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/terps-press-play-on-a-unique-learning-experience"
section: Articles
---
# Terps Press Play on a Unique Learning Experience

*April 28, 2025* — by [Annie Krakower](/author/annie-krakower)


> College of Information Class Explores Immersive Aspects of Games

*INST730 Games As Emergent Experiences 04162025 DS 3878 1920x1080 — As part of the College of Information class “Games as Emergent Experiences,” students play a game of their own, trying to convince as many of their peers as possible to join them at the fictional bar, Pavlooney’s, based on specific conditions (below).*

A typical night for a college student might be to read a textbook chapter or watch a lecture for homework and then fire up the PS5 or Switch. But for Terps in one University of Maryland class, the video games *are* the homework.

The College of Information course, “Games as Emergent Experiences,” explores how different aspects of video game design, from the characters to the music to the aesthetics, affect how well players can immerse themselves in the digital environments. Students level up each week by completing three “quests”: reading about a game element, watching a video on the same topic, then taking a related game for a spin themselves.

“Play and learning are actually inextricably intertwined. If you’re playing, you’re learning something,” said Assistant Professor Caro Williams-Pierce, who teaches the course. “With games, you get to experiment with sometimes fundamentally different worldviews in a low-stakes, optional way.”

Having grown up in rural Maine without access to video games or even a computer, she jokes that she’s now “making up for lost time.” After friends introduced her to role-playing classics like “Diablo II” and “World of Warcraft,” she combined her newfound love of gaming with her curriculum and instruction grad school studies at the University of Wisconsin to develop her read-watch-play methodology, which she’s used since she started teaching the class at UMD in 2020.

“It is more interesting and motivating than just reading a bunch of readings,” said Uhjin Sim, a first-year information science Ph.D. student, who likened earning points for each task to completing levels in a game. “The whole concept is very fitting to the nature of this class.”

Students—whether undergraduate or graduate, gaming experts or novices—then take turns leading the class discussion each week. In one recent lesson, human-computer interaction master’s students Yabing Yang and Ruibin Zheng delved into how players become characters immersed in virtual worlds. Do effective tutorials or accurate cultural context in games, they asked, foster deeper connections? And how does an audio-only game—like “Zombies, Run,” a fitness app that prompts users to jog faster as sounds of the undead get closer—affect the emergent experience?


*student holds conditions card: "Payday Pavlo. Money: $80. Availability: Friday after 7 p.m., anytime on weekends. Other conditions: You must have 3 drinks at Pavlooney's"*


*group of students claps — Yabing Yang congratulates the winners of the “Journey to Pavlooney’s” game.*



**Sidebar note:**

All through April, Maryland Today will celebrate how the University of Maryland is reimagining learning and teaching. Find more stories at [today.umd.edu/topic/we-reimagine-learning](https://today.umd.edu/topic/we-reimagine-learning).





**Topics:** [Campus & Community](https://today.umd.edu/tags/campus-community)


**Tags:** [Student Experience](https://today.umd.edu/topic/student-experience)


**Units:** [College of Information](https://today.umd.edu/topic/college-information-studies)