Stormfuhrer (4 page)

Carlos made himself at home to a bottle of Corona from the fridge, one of several that he had left there the previous week, while Richard took the box to his corner and cut the shipping tape with a pocket knife.  From the box, Richard pulled out a black helmet dripping with shipping peanuts, connecting wires trailing to the floor.  This is what he had been waiting for, the perfect interface for pure absorption into the game.

Carlos flopped onto the couch, followed by Fraulein jumping up to lie at the opposite end, mentioning something by the way about his kids and their friends having taking over the house, while he reached for the remote.  Richard detached the audio hook-ups from his computer and tossed the old headset into the square box, stashing it behind his computer table.  The shiny, black helmet was a unique find, only $350 through an online auction, new at $850.  When all the wires were hooked up, it would display a wide screen inches from the wearer's eyes that wrapped around almost from ear to ear. 

Experimenting with the helmet, he found that he no longer had to use the mouse ball to tilt his head, for with the helmet on, he could tilt his own head and the avatar would do the same. When he turned his head to the left, the image in front of his eyes shifted at nearly the exact same moment, so that the virtual reality almost matched reality itself.  Incredibly, the visual experience almost seemed three-dimensional and the audio was faultless.  It was truly a thing of beauty.

Fall 2021

The summer of his discovery was approaching its bittersweet end.  Because of the game and the time it seemed to require of him, he knew he wouldn’t be able to muster the focus needed to prepare for a completely new year.  He decided to teach on autopilot as his thoughts, he knew, would be filled daily with the game's most recent scenario.  He used the same lesson plans from the year before, which had been honed and choreographed to near perfection from previous years.  This school year would involve almost no course preparation on his part, though it would still required him to grade assignments and enter scores into the online grade book that all teachers in his district were required to maintain.  A tiny fraction of his own time would be sacrificed.  The rest could be devoted to developing his character, his Nazi avatar.

As the fall semester progressed, however, Richard Hayes began to see the teaching potential behind his new obsession.  He himself was learning much about the time period, the details involved in running a labor camp, the relationships between persons of equal and unequal rank.  What educational objectives would be gained if students played it during class time, perhaps as an extra incentive?  It touched on sociological experiences, psychological, even anthropological ones.  He could team up with Perry, the English teacher across the hall, and assign all kinds of projects that allowed students to connect their experiences in the game with the more complicated elements of their own lives.  Gods, what social studies objectives
wouldn’t
be met?

Still, he doubted that all students would want to play the same avatar.  Did they vary from student to student?  Doubtful, since there was no log-in of any kind, no sequence of entries that would tell the program who had logged in.  They would all play the same ava
tar—
Stur
mf
ü
hr
er
Heinrich Mauer, SS, guard at Dachau.   But their differing reactions might cause widely differentiated game results between students, results that could be compared, students' decision-making skills honed through an analysis of their differing reactions to identical stimuli.

In November, Mr. Hayes decided to give extra credit to a student in desperate need of it.  It would be an experiment with the game, an after-school endeavor lasting two weeks.  He would have the student open the browser to the site address, as he had done during the earliest days of the summer, and simply watch as the student interacted with the game.  The student would perhaps score a point for every day he could stay alive for ten days.  The points would simply be added to his six weeks average.

Richard had twelve computers of various makes and computing speeds that he had collected over the years, with administrative approval, from the classrooms of teachers who had left the district.  He sat Marcus at the newest and fastest model, watching over his shoulder.  Marcus wore a headset and a somewhat worn pair of studded interactive gloves.  He was also given a mouse-ball.

When the image appeared, his avatar was standing in the middle of a street intersection.  The bright sun revealed all the details of the surroundings, the people, the cars.  Marcus was startled and made quick movements with the gloves and ball.  The character immediately collapsed.  Cars of late 1930s make drove slowly around him.  Some beeped their horns, drivers staring as they drove by.  One car stopped at a shoulder.  A man in a gray coat got out to direct the traffic around him.  Richard intervened, taking over the headset, the gloves and the ball.  He expertly brought the character to a standing position, “Excuse me.”  He had the character smile.  “It must be the heat.” The man in the gray coat smiled back and waved as he walked back to his car.  The usually soft-spoken Marcus was very impressed, amazedly looking back and forth between Hayes and his avatar on the screen.  His mouth was wide open.

Hayes transferred the interactive devices back to Marcus and taught him the basics, raising his arms and positioning the ball for him until he was able to maintain some control over the character.  In twenty minutes, Marcus was directing traffic passably well.

Knowing what he now knew, Hayes actively sought ways to incorporate the game into his social studies units, ways he could implement gradually, perhaps piloting his ideas in May.  With only twelve computers, he would have to rotate students through the stations while perhaps teaching the others regarding the historical background needed to make the best decisions in the game.  Planning anything, however, was difficult--there was always the Game.  The distraction ate up his spare hours like minutes.  It fed on his days. 

Of course, there were many justifications for including the game into his curriculum.  Not the least of which was the linguistic slant it gave to his history lessons.  Perry, his team-teacher of English across the hall, with whose chronological structure he generally paralleled his own history course, would love that.  Certainly by May Perry would be covering 20th century literature, which would work well within the context of the game.  Over the last months, Hayes had learned the essentials of the German language very quickly.  There was no reason why students couldn’t also be immersed into a second language this way.  Perhaps in the years to follow, the game could be introduced early in the school year, about the time when Perry had the seniors studying the Old English epic poem
Beowulf
, for instance.  The German language encountered in the game would provide an excellent Anglo-Saxon linguistic tie-in to the work while Hayes would give them history lessons regarding relevant Saxon and British migrations.  There were plenty of English words—originally Old German or Saxon--that survived the later French-Norman invasion of England in 1066.  The most frequently used words, in fact, like fish, hand, arm, nose, hair, water, cow, grass, stool, boat, and gold, had their identical or near-identical German equivalents.  As far as learning nouns was concerned, German was the easiest language for any English speaker to master.

Literature (they would have to read newspapers in the game, after all), geography, cultural awareness, even science for some students, all would be worked into the history lessons—through the Game.  Of course, there was also political science, discussions they would have involving the social, economic, and governmental causes for historical events overshadowing those of the game. 

Hayes had realized since the first hours of playing, that causes and effects were inextricably linked.  One’s choices inevitably and irrevocably affected his or her avatar’s outcomes.  Of course there was the difficulty of mastering the mouse ball and gloves for movement, which took Hayes himself a full two weeks to maneuver smoothly and naturally.  He knew, however, that it would take most of his teens much less time to overcome the difficulties of the interface.

Spring 2022

By early May, Richard Hayes had introduced the game to his students.  Student buy-in was slow, however, due to the insufficiently powerful processors running in most of the 12 computers.  Lag made the game almost impossible to play on a few of his units.  He knew he would need the most modern computers to run this game along with a much wider range of bandwidth for 24 students to play it simultaneously in a single classroom.  It was a huge challenge to consider for next year, but not an impossibility.

In mid-May, Hayes applied for a last-minute State grant that might mean getting more powerful computers and faster Internet flowing into his classroom.  Fortunately, he had come across an advertisement seeking grant applications for a grant open to every school in the South Texas region.  His part would be to convince the readers of the grant’s applications that his plan for the new computers was more worthy than those of any that might apply from his particular school, which wouldn’t be difficult since most teachers and administrators were essentially intimidated by the new teaching technologies emerging in education, and the few that weren’t were years behind understanding its possibilities. 

Hayes spend a week that May on the planning of an idea that would, he knew, sell to the grant providers like lottery tickets to eight-year-olds armed with third grade math.  It would be a plan involving some off-the-shelf software that he would never use, at least not for very long.  Any reasonable justification he could make for the purchase that combined increased student confidence and improved State test scores would surely be placed at the top of the list. 

Fortunately, there was a new software suite on the market that was supposed to improve a student’s sense of self-worth and thereby open a cognitive gateway for a child to actually see the value of the education s/he was receiving.  It was touted to somehow develop in students an intrinsic motivation to achieve better scores on the StatSat IV, the State test for low-performing seniors attempting to graduate.  The software was the Aris MindMage Suite, and it
required
updated equipment and wide bandwidth.  It “reasoned with” the student as s/he took multiple choice tests on one part of the screen, giving hints and acting as a kind of video buddy, a “partner for success.”  His administrators signed off on it with barely a thought, as did the grant evaluating committee.  By July the grant for improved bandwidth, a lab license for using the MindMage software, and 24 high-speed computers was his.

CHAPTER 3

Fall 2022

The computers bought with the grant money were installed in Richard’s classroom over the last few weeks of the summer.  The computers themselves, which nearly covered the entire room, were embedded in special one-piece desks that looked like rows of low, heavy brown mail-drop boxes, the kind made with long necks so letters can be inserted into them from an open car window.  One merely had to sit down and press the top of the angled L-shaped box to watch the screen slowly raise itself up from horizontal.  A keyboard would then glide out of what looked like the mail slot and position itself under awaiting fingers.   Interactive gloves and mouse-balls were stored in large cavities on either side.  The Internet flowed in by means of a satellite dish which pushed connectivity into the room through cables like a busted water line, all mounted just outside the classroom’s small window. 

There were twenty-four computer stations positioned in four columns of six.  The walkway between the columns was covered in cables of various thicknesses and colors, eventually to be zip-tied together in bundles and placed out of the way along the edges of the units.  There was also about a yard or so of walking space around the room’s perimeter.

Hayes’ next move was to put a box around each station.  Each student would be completely enclosed in his and her personal, virtual space by refrigerator boxes.  Interactive helmets, like the one he used at home, would have been ideal to achieve this private realm for each player, but the grant money had been maxed out by the units themselves—and by the ridiculous, overpriced software that he would only use
per se
.   Instead, he came up with the idea of covering the units with refrigerator boxes.  Within a few weeks, he had access to dozens of the largest size, discarded from various retailers across the Valley.  His old Subaru truck would only carry a few at a time, but gradually all 24 units were covered.

Farash had dropped in during Preparation Week, the workweek before students returned, the time when mandatory in-services could be gotten out of the way, when teachers put up their class rules and decorated their doors and walls and bulletin boards with catchy slogans like “Launching off with LEARNING!” picture of rocket ship included, and a smiling moon, on which stood a little passe schoolhouse with the bell, a tiny teacher waving from its doorway.  Farash wanted to prepare his own wall with a time-line that ran from one side of the door, starting with the Sumerians, all the way around the room to the other side of the door, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  He would create and post the pictures and the events himself.