A professor at Saint Louis University is using video games to teach language skills to students. Simone Bregni, Ph.D., started playing games in 1975 when he was 12, according to a press release. During the mid-’80s, he realized playing text adventures helped him learn English. That revelation inspired his research and teaching methods, along with work he did for a leading Italian video game publication in the 1990s.

He recently received a fellowship grant from SLU’s Reinert Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning to develop a language course based entirely on gaming. The class, called Intensive Italian for Gamers, reportedly provided students with two semesters worth of language acquisition over the course of a single fall semester. By the final, they were three to five points ahead of students who attended a traditional Italian course.