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Hooray for American higher education!

As a former liberal-arts major, NewsFeed often takes offense at various news stories complaining about college classes covering popular culture. (We once took a course called “Chinese Martial Arts Cinema” and it was very educational, OK?) However, those courses still involved things like reading books and showing up every once in while, which is more than NewsFeed can say about the University of Florida’s “21st Century Skills in Starcraft” course. Oh, excuse us — we meant to say “the University of Florida’s online ’21st Century Skills in Starcraft’ honors course.”

Take it away, course description:

“’21st Century Skills in Starcraft’ is an 8-week, entirely online course that uses the popular real time strategy (RTS) game Starcraft to teach valuable 21st Century Skills through a hands-on approach. With society becoming increasingly technology-based and fast-paced, it is important for professionals to be highly proficient in skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making. […] This course includes required weekly game play, viewing and analysis of recorded matches, written assignments which emphasize analysis and synthesis of real/game-world concepts, and collaboration with other students.”

See, it’s educational: It teaches ‘valuable 21st-century skills!’ And it requires written papers, which NewsFeed hopes will result in a lot of academically rigorous game-theory analyses of the Photon Cannon Rush. So take that, haters! All those people who said that UF was not a strenuous academic institution … were basically right. (via Crunchgear)