It’s not everyday that teachers adopt a teaching technique that promises to bring joy to the hearts of millions of students.

The Wall Street Journal reporter Stephanie Banchero has the details on some new teaching tools being phased into American classrooms.

At a private school in Houston, eighth-graders slingshot angry red birds across a video screen for a lesson on Newton’s law of motion. High-school students in Los Angeles create the “Zombie Apocalypse” computer game to master character development. And elementary students in Hampstead, N.C., build a virtual city to understand spatial reasoning.

These seemingly playful adventures represent a new frontier in education: videogames as teaching tools. Though it’s still a budding movement, scores of teachers nationwide are using games such as “Angry Birds,” “Minecraft,” “SimCity” and “World of Warcraft” to teach math, science, writing, teamwork and even compassion. In Chicago and New York, entire schools have been created that use the principles of game design in curriculum development.

The movement is driven by a generation of young teachers who grew up with computer games, a national push for innovative teaching methods in K-12 classrooms and a need to reach children whose obsession with videogames sometimes desensitizes them to the traditional, slower-paced classroom lectures.

Proponents say videogames can be powerful classroom instruments that prod students to think creatively to solve complex problems. They provide rapid feedback that forces students to rethink and alter strategies. And they can empower students to work together to conquer specific tasks.