When Corbin was born, I had a part-time job doing data transcription from home.  He would sleep on my lap, or nurse in his sling, while I listened to tapes and entered information into endless forms.  So you could say that he has literally been around computers since he was born.

Eventually he could sit on his own, and loved to type letters and see them appear on the screen.  His gibberish letters were printed and sent out to grandparents and uncles, and of course we all joked that “If we could only transcribe these we would probably know all of the answers to the meaning of life!”  Before long Corbin was playing little pre-school games with me, learning to use a mouse, and looking at pictures of his family on the internet.

About 18 months ago our family began a new obsession… playing City of Heroes (CoH).  It started innocently enough, Corbin’s dad Kevin found a fun new game and they started playing together.  Before long they introduced me to the game, I introduced Craig to the game, and now among us we have 5 separate accounts (even Gabriel has his own!) and we sometimes get together online in the evenings to play as a family.  All of this was done for pure entertainment, of course.  Little boys love to play Super Heroes, so this game was just an extension of their imaginary games.

Numerical Awareness
I started to notice, however, that there was more than pure entertainment happening.  On a trip in Hawaii in January of 2005, Corbin started asking about the numbers on speed limit signs.  “What number is two five?” he would ask.  “Twenty-five,” I replied.  “What number is three five?”  “Thirty-five,” I replied.  “So 35 is faster than 35, right Mom?”  He had learned, through playing CoH, that there were different levels on characters, and that the ones that started with a 2 were more powerful than the ones that started with a 1, for example.  He made the quick connection to the speed limits, and within 5 or 6 signs he was reading the numbers correctly to me. My son learned how to read double-digit numbers on a five minute car ride, all spawned from his interest in knowing who the more powerful game players were in his favorite games.

Learning the Alphabet
Corbin had been learning his ABC’s since he was two, but had never really correlated the written letters to the fun little song we would sing.  At the age of five, however, he was ready – he needed to know what those silly symbols on the keyboard were in order to type in his own account name & password, and to move his character.  Finally he had a passion that led to a real world need to understand and know letters.  It didn’t take long for him to learn A,S,D,W, & X, the characters needed for movement, and while I won’t share his password here, those letters came very soon after.  He began filling in the rest of the blanks over time, and at this point knows them all.

Sight Words
Another lesson he learned quickly was reading a few basic sight words, starting with Yes & No.  Often times, in game play, invitations pop up on your screen, for example asking you to join a team. Corbin quickly had to learn which word said Yes, and which word said No, in order to keep playing the game.  He learned other words this way, too: ‘Train up to the next level’ was a phrase he grasped almost immediately.  ‘Yellow Line’ (the name of the train most often used for travel in the game) was another quickie.  Not the words you usually find on kindergarten flashcards, but useful in his world of game play.  Before long there were about 40 or 50 words he could read by sight.

Phonetic Awareness
There are only so many words that one can learn by sight, so a need for ‘sounding things out’ arose in Corbin’s world.  When looking, for example, at a list of city areas at the train station, one must know the difference between Steel Canyon & Kings Row.  For a low-level character, the difference between those two is literally life & death!  Corbin began to use his knowledge of letters and their sounds to figure out which areas were which.  Steel (sssss) and King (k) are very different sounds, and by identifying the initial letter sounds he was able to identify the words themselves (he had already memorized the names of all the areas, so all that was needed was the initial sounds).  This came in handy more and more as his characters grew in their power and there were even more areas to visit.

Writing & Spelling
Another feature of the game is chatting.  Since you are playing with people from all over the world (literally at times), you talk to one another using a chat window.  Being in communication with your team is very important: you need to know who is going to do what, when a character needs a break and won’t be there to back you up, and many other intricacies.  This part of the game was only accessible to Corbin through his father & me – when we played with him, we would talk about what the team members were saying.  It didn’t take too long before Corbin wanted to participate in this part of the game as well.  He soon learned to type “Hi” and “OK.”  The last time I played with him, he typed in “Let’s go” when it was time to run to another area.  He will also ask for the spelling on other words so he can type them in, and in this way he has expanded his spelling knowledge and communication abilities.

These days, Corbin is writing club notices on the main board in the school, typing in his own website addresses (usually with spelling assistance), spelling out words phonetically, and reading anything he can recognize.  This isn’t earth-shattering development by any means – Corbin would be finishing up first grade in a traditional school setting, and these are all skills your typical first grader would have at this point.  What is worthwhile to point out is that all of this has happened without a single reading class, worksheet, or textbook.  Every milestone has been met as a result of his passion for super-heroes and computer games, and a particular need that arose in his play.  That is a true expression of self-directed learning and the power of finding your passions.