University of Florida Adds Class Based on StarCraft

It’s not quite the prerequisite one might be used to seeing for a college course: “basic knowledge of and experience playing StarCraft.”

The University of Florida is offering a class utilizing StarCraft, in order to assist in the teaching of resource management skills, a theory which Ph.D Candidate and instructor Mate Poling outlined for the Technology Review (thanks Joystiq), saying, “In StarCraft you're managing a lot of different units and groups of different capacities.”

He added, “It's not a stretch to think of that in the business world or in the work of a healthcare administrator.”

Additionally:

Poling points out that people who manage hospitals, factories, small businesses and, say, nuclear power plants all have to manage people who have different abilities, and that they might have learned a thing or two about this process from StarCraft, which demands the same kind of resource and unit management.

Twenty-five students have signed up for the class, which will be taught remotely, another first for UF.

While they won’t have a final exam per se, the students participating will receive grades, which will count towards their GPAs.