I recently had the good fortune to listen to one of Alan November’s podcasts featuring Sichuan native Yong Zhao, now a Michigan State University distinguished professor of educational psychology and technology. Yong Zhao was speaking about a game he was creating to make learning Putonghua a fun activity for kids.

I was very interested and did a lot of searching at the time but could not find much on the game. Fortunately I read about its release this morning in eSchool News.

The game is called Zon. From the site:

Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

By interacting in the Zon environment you will be exposed to Chinese language and cultural knowledge in a new and exciting way.  Everything that you do in the game is another chance to learn new words, phrases and cultural info about China.  Never before has learning Chinese been more fun.

Whilst I haven’t had time for a play myself yet, it looks like something teachers here should know about.