Guitar Hero 101: NYU to Offer Course in Rocking Out
"Video games are an understudied area," says one prof
By VICTORIA CAVALIERE
Updated 7:33 AM EST, Mon, Aug 31, 2009
Apparently, New York University is turning into the School of Rock, and this semester, you are expected to ace your "Guitar Hero" class.
NYU students, who shell out $50,000 a year for their first rate education, can (really) enroll in Professor Gary Marcus' is class "Guitar Heroes (and Heroines): Music, Video Games and the Nature of Human Cognition," the New York Post reports.
"Video games are an understudied area," said Marcus, a psychology professor. "People dismiss them unfairly, but 'Guitar Hero' is a good tool for teaching and I'm interested in the nature of learning."
The course will tackle the finer points of video games and human cognition and it already has a waiting list.
Not a video game fan? There's also "The Poetics of Television" and a see-and-do class called "Can Exercise Change Your Brain?"
The premise? Students attend an hour-long high-impact aerobics class every session. The sweaty students then sit through a lecture on how exercise enhances cognitive performance.
Some parents aren't buying it.
"I just wrote a big check here," fumed Glen Jackson, whose son, Jeff, is an incoming freshman at NYU. "I'm not paying for him to study video games. It seems a bit watered down."
First Published: Aug 30, 2009 11:57 AM EST
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