{"id":23176,"date":"2010-10-19T08:14:50","date_gmt":"2010-10-19T12:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=23176"},"modified":"2011-05-31T12:43:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-31T16:43:00","slug":"keeping-latin-alive-and-lively","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2010\/10\/keeping-latin-alive-and-lively\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping Latin Alive and Lively"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"<p>Karen<\/a>
Teaching assistant Karen Zook can follow the online adventures of her first-year Latin class as they chat on an Internet forum. Photo by Sheila Foran<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Is Latin moribund? Not if you are learning this \u2018dead\u2019 language in Karen Zook\u2019s elementary Latin class here in Storrs. Nor for students in a select number of Connecticut high schools where Operation LAPIS<\/a> has students not only doing their homework but asking for more.<\/p>\n

Roger Travis<\/a>, an associate professor of classics in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences<\/a>, has developed an introductory-level Latin curriculum that combines a traditional format, using the well respected Cambridge Latin Course<\/a>, with modern game theory. The result takes a learning activity and turns it into a game.<\/p>\n

According to Travis, \u201cPeople have tried for years to make introductory Latin engaging. The Cambridge Latin Course does this by using a story about a Roman family that lives in Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. However, we decided that rather than just having students read the story, we would take it a step further and make a game out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The classroom portion of both the high school and college level classes is not substantially different from traditional classes in the subject. The difference comes when students are divided into teams and are challenged to be the first to solve the clues given to them by their leader in a role playing activity. This challenge takes the place of traditional homework.<\/p>\n

\"<p>Students<\/a>
Students in the LAPIS course learn to find their way around the ancient city of Pompeii. Photo by Sheila Foran<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Players on each team can see the answers of their teammates as they work through their challenges, and their instructor can tell via their screen names which players are the most active participants. While teams cannot see the underlying collaboration of the other teams, they do see what the other teams have decided to do in response to the prompts that have sent them on their journey.<\/p>\n

Kevin Ballestrini, a former student of Travis\u2019s who is now a teacher at Norwich Free Academy, played a pivotal role in developing the program. He says, \u201cWe created a parallel story of our own that weaves in and out of the text. Students visit places online that they\u2019ve read about in the book. They\u2019re asked questions about the characters they are playing, and they\u2019re given challenges that they have to solve as a group, while learning about themselves as individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along the way, students can collect CARDs (Classical Attunement Reward Devices, which look remarkably like baseball cards) for their efforts in filling out individual sheets that have examples of key elements of Latin morphology and syntax, and facts about Roman culture.<\/p>\n

In addition to making the study of Latin fun, Ballestrini has noticed another benefit of the team approach to problem solving, especially with his freshmen. \u201cNFA is a huge high school,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve got an enrollment of about 2,500, with kids coming from eight different towns. I have two Latin One classes; one is using LAPIS and the other is a traditional classroom. As soon as the day after their first assignment, the kids in the LAPIS class were much more engaged and social with one another because they had to do their homework as a team, most often with kids they hadn\u2019t known before.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, he says, he\u2019s had to place a 9 p.m. moratorium on team collaboration so the students serving as Lead Operatives can prepare their reports. Otherwise, he says, \u201csome of them would just keep going\u201d.<\/p>\n

Zook is a third-year Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies in the Department of Modern & Classical Languages<\/a>. With a background in the classics, she is quick to recognize that the study of a foreign language can be intimidating.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a solid program, and it works, \u201cshe says. \u201cThere aren\u2019t a lot of outside resources when you are studying Latin. You can\u2019t just go and ask your friends if your accent sounds right, as you can when you\u2019re studying French or Spanish. Part of the idea with LAPIS is to create a kind of immersion experience \u2026 it\u2019s the next best thing to study abroad.\u201d<\/p>\n

As in any class, both Ballestrini and Zook point out, the students who are most engaged in the learning process do the best. Justin Tito, a junior anthropology major and a veteran of Travis\u2019 gaming course in Homer, which he took last semester, agrees.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the Homer<\/a> class, we played Lord of the Rings online as part of the course and we wrote essays on how it related to the Iliad and the Odyssey,\u201d says Tito. \u201cWe still had to read the texts and understand them, but then we got to sit down for an hour and play a video game, and then you\u2019d notice things in the game that pertained to what you had just read.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the Latin class, he says, \u201cLAPIS gives us the ability to have fun when we do our homework and when we do the reading. We\u2019re learning without knowing that we\u2019re learning. In our forums, we talk through what our characters would do, and give our responses. It makes learning less of a chore and more of an experience.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roger Travis has developed a Latin curriculum that includes modern game theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[56],"class_list":["post-23176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-12 15:59:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23176"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37568,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23176\/revisions\/37568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23176"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=23176"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}