This morning while I was sitting in the teachers’ lounge drinking a nice cup of green tea, an announcement came over the PA system. As usual I and the other teachers tuned it out, as these announcements are pretty much the same thing every day. Then I heard something I was not expecting, the words “Doubutsu no Mori” or as we know it “Animal Crossing”. Now I started listening.

Since I missed the first part it didn’t make much sense, all I got was that Animal Crossing was now forbidden. I needed more info so I asked the teacher next to me. He hadn’t been listening either so he asked the math teacher. He said that it was due to what the students were doing in the computer lab.

Students will often go to the computer lab for math or other classes and are supposed to be following along with what the teacher is doing on their own screens and ignore the fact that the computers are Internet enabled. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

But what makes this interesting is the fact that they weren’t searching for the normal things (flash games, porn, 4 color rebellion, etc) but for hints and info about Animal Crossing. This info came after the teacher checked the ‘link history’ on the browsers. Turns out it was an epidemic! Kids were viewing sites with Animal Crossing themes rather than paying attention to a lecture about fractions. I know, I was shocked too.

What’s weird is that they mentioned Animal Crossing specifically in the announcement rather than a simple “don’t use the internet during math class” message. Later I was talking to the math teacher about what he though of the game and he said, “All the students care about is that stupid game, they don’t study enough”. So in other words, students prefer to do something fun rather than something boring. This is definitely a problem. Right now it seems to only affect Japanese students but watch out rest of the world, this could be spreading.