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He saw students pouring energy into memorizing bits of information that he knew they’d later forget. So he structured the rest of the syllabus around creating the simulation. Now he gets rid of about 40 percent of the rules of the game each semester so that students have to come up with new rules to determine how the interactions will play out. “The most learning happens there,” he says.

World Sim materials go up on a class “wiki,” a collection of Web pages that professor and students edit. Building new-media literacy is one of Wesch’s goals. Very few students arrive at his class knowing how to use digital tools such as wikis.

“There’s nothing more important than loving your students,” Wesch says, his office full of props from the simulation. “Before I lecture I start getting nervous ... so I meditate on this idea of ‘Love your students.’“It completely displaces all of that anxiety, because you recognize, it’s not about me, it’s about them.”

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