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A veteran health teacher with a reputation among students for maintaining class discipline, Evelyn Lund is not a typical candidate for embracing game-based approaches to learning.
 Nonetheless, after successfully piloting the www.BlueKids.org e-learning program, Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs II, with her 8th-graders, she implemented the course as the main component of ATOD education at Oregon Middle School.
The new course, developed by Children's Health Education Center, provides a comprehensive set of lesson materials, which meet district standards and benchmarks for substance abuse education. The games encourage students to engage in activities where they confront risk-taking, peer pressure and the physiological effects of alcohol, tobacco and other substances.
"It's an important unit, and at first I worried that putting the students in front of a computer for an hour every day would take away from my ability to play a more personal role," Lund said. "But after going through the course package, I realized it didn't have to happen that way. I had a lot of control over how to use the material."
Rather than having students pursue the lessons individually, Lund opts to project the core information in a multimedia format, which incorporates visuals, sounds, moving text, animation and video segments. Her students then tackle the relevant games and activities on individual computers.
Lund motivates students by encouraging competition. "For Dodging Risks, I put high scores on the white board, which got a number of the students going," she said of her class last spring.
Lund's 124 students from last spring demonstrated learning benefits similar to those of the pilot class from the fall. On average, students' grades improved 17 percent from the pre- to post-test, an improvement of nearly two letter grades.
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