As I think about how best to describe the impact of the NWP on my own teaching, I return again and again to these three questions:

• What have our students learned thanks to the National Writing Project?
• What have our students made thanks to the National Writing Project?
• How has the National Writing Project brought democracy, civic-mindedness, and service to our classrooms, schools, and communities?

Thank you for joining #blog4nwp in answering these questions for our nation’s leaders. NWP delivers on the educational promise our country makes to its students; it’s vital that our elected officials understand.

First, here’s an example of a completed citizen-artist project.

Here’s is the student’s writing about corporate citizenship – the student wrote about a video game production company as a citizen-artist.

Bioware Is a Canadian electronics company. It was founded In February of 1995 by Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuk, and Augustine Yip. There first game was Shattered Steel and they are currently working on Star wars: The Old Republic, Dragon Age 2, and Mass Effect 3. The company is most known for there Dragon Age and Mass Effect games.

On December 4, 2009 Bioware introduced a Facebook game called Gift Of The Yeti. During the sponsorship time they donated anywhere from 1 penny to 10,000 dollars to the Child’s Play Charity. Child’s Play is a non-profit organization that helps kids in need at children’s hospitals get gifts. Bioware is a good citizen because they donated money to the Child’s Play charity.

For clarification: during its sponsorship period, Bioware donated $.01 per Gift of the Yeti player to Child’s Play, capped at $10,000.

And here is the student’s complementary portrait of a Krogan, one of the alien races featured in Bioware’s Mass Effect series.

I’m still working out how to help students create an exhibition of these works once they’re all finished.

We’re also working the Lego letterpress idea into an interdisciplinary unit combining novel study and our civics curriculum.

In language arts, students have been reading Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion , while in civics they’ve been studying the roles that political parties play in United States elections.

Here’s a quick recap of the book:

To survive, Matt (a clone) must escape the clutches of el Patrón (his sire) before el Patrón harvests him for spare parts. El Patrón rules his plantation in Opium, a borderland narco-state between the United States and Mexico created after the legalization of drugs. El Patrón employs “eejits” or kidnapped and brain-chipped wold-be border-crossers to fund his life-style and uses a series of clones to prolong his life. After making his escape and leading a rebellion of child-laborers against the principals of a plankton farm, Matt decides to come to terms with el Patrón’s legacy and he returns to Opium to to make things as right as they can be in a narco-state. El Patrón, at this point, is out of the picture, having died without the parts for which he grew Matt. Much of the story deals with Matt asserting his human identify through relationships with care-givers and other emotional interests who help him find a self and purpose outside of those given to him by his parent, el Patrón. Please help me with what I’ve missed.

After students had done some work to find out what separates Democrats from Republicans, I asked them to create imaginary political parties supporting Matt and el Patrón in running for President of Opium. Then I asked students to pick a side and to create campaign materials for their camps. I explained that folks on el Patrón’s side could use any of our resources, including computers, to make the slickest fliers and ads they could imagine. I explained that folks on Matt’s side would have to be more resourceful and try to influence public opinion using less expensive tools and materials. I wanted to emphasize for students the role money plays in limiting who can run for office and how they can run for office.

Happily, no one has chosen to work for el Patrón.

That means that we’re all working on letterpress campaign fliers using Legos to type-set Matt’s messages. Here are some photos to illustrate the idea:

Clean-up takes some time, but since we’re not using our Legos for anything but our class press, no one is stressing a stray bit of paint dried on a baseplate.

I hope we risk bolder designs for fun and future assignments. We bought our Lego’s fresh, but I’m already envisioning a reduce-reuse-recycle campaign for collecting unused Legos from stake-holders’ homes next year. We should also analyze our finished products for impact and consider revising based on some kind of safe peer and/or expert critique.

There’s definitely traditional content work going on here through Before-During-After exercises that borrow bits and pieces from interactive notebook activities. However, I hope that our arts-infused, inter-disciplinary synthesis of fact and fiction gives students a fun way to make something in response to some of the issues that will face their generation of voters – issues like immigration and human cloning. By using novels with real world issues, we can also play serious politics without running afoul of equal time public school ethics restraints.

I’d recommend trying the project with any high quality dystopian novel. I’d like to try it with The Hunger Games series and The Giver in particular. These are the quest books that let kids confront and problem-solve the looming inequities in their lives, communities, and world in much the same way that well-designed games do.

Let me know if you’d like any of the materials that scaffolded our work. And here’s the current YA Dystopian Reading Challenge, you know, just for fun.

After watching the video, students chose three Cold War topics to research and interrelate in a student-designed project.

What I love about student choice is that teachers and students together discover new ways of showing off students’ learning. Here’s one way a student decided to share what he learned:

• First, he chose to interrelate the Cold War, ICBMs, and MAD, as did many students.
• Next he researched the who, what, when, where, and so what of each topic in relation to the others.
• Then he programmed Scratch animations that illustrated each topic. While he already had a solid understanding of Scratch basics, he learned how to put a streaking star field behind an ICBM flying in the opposite direction to increase the speed of the missile relative to the background.
• After that, he discovered Google Sketch Up and its 3D Warehouse. When he finished browsing through the sports cars, he started work modeling his own ICBM. He got frustrated when he could only make a box for the missile’s body, so he learned how to make a cylinder. He got frustrated when he could only make a pyramid for the missile’s warhead, so he learned how to make a cone. Even when frustrated, he complained in the language of geometry.
• Next, he wants to import his model into Scratch as an image file and replace his “hand-drawn” missile sprite with it. He has already plotted its course using the X-Y coordinate tools in Scratch.
• While he works, he’s frequently called away to help classmates program in Scratch.
• He calls me over every day to show me what he’s figured out.
• At some point in the near future, as determined by his sense of completion, the student will finish his animations for the other topics and reflect in writing on what he learned by researching the Cold War and making his movies.

By picking his topics and the way he wants to show his learning, this student has shown me a new way to integrate social studies (the Cold War) with art (Scratch sprites and Google Sketch Up Models from online visual references), math (geometry and X-Y coordinate plotting), and writing (reflections on learning).

Moreover, he’s had fun learning. I’ve had fun watching him.

Andrew Barras, who writes and tweets on educational futurism as @CrudBasher, lent a hand in our work, as well. Andrew Skyped in to class this week to talk with this student and his programming peers. Andrew has a decade of experience teaching art design for video games and is currently a Master’s candidate at Full Sail University. We got to ask questions about the size of game design teams for titles on different platforms. We got to ask questions about free modeling tools and game engines and the ones that professionals use. We learned that there are more artists than programmers on AAA games. Being math phobic, I never would have guessed that.

Andrew was incredibly generous with his time and seemed like a natural with kids. I hope we Skype again soon. We had fun talking with him.

Andrew also said something that stuck with my students after we hung up: don’t let school stop you from learning about what really matters to you. Keep learning about what matters to you all day long. You can teach yourself all you need to know to do what you want.

With that notion, Andrew helped me set a goal for the Spring a next year: to blur the line between learning inside and outside school through student choice and personal meaning.

We’re also going to download Apple’s iPhone developer’s kit and see what else we can teach ourselves.

All in all, we’re pretty much having fun.

Why don’t we teachers let ourselves and our students do that more often?

Without over-sharing, I’m amazed at how my son is learning skateboarding. Every time he falls, he gets back up. He picks up a new skill nightly, which means he’ll need a new coach soon since I haven’s skated since, say, 1991. Skateboarding, at least for my son, seems to be the epitome of learning by failing forward, to the side, on the curb, and off the back of the board. I never would have guessed it.

And that’s the point. What else am I missing as a teacher? What haven’t I valued yet in students’ lives that could offer our shared classroom more compelling models of learning than those I think of from my own limited experience? Why aren’t my skaters skating at school, sharing about it, and being asked to apply how they learn skating to how they learn history? Why haven’t I looked for ways to make learning history like skateboarding? How can I now design learning experiences that are toys, toy-like and/or customizable? How can I design learning experiences that motivate students to push past fear and the anticipation of pain from past school wounding? How can I design learning experiences that make failure explicitly essential to mastering new skills?

What is skateboarding for my students who don’t skateboard?

Think of me kindly as I try to better follow students’ learning instead of leading them back through mine. Think of me kindly, also, as I start skating again with my son and try to capture the zen of learning design while watching for traffic.

Here’s to the abrasions and contusions of learning.

Yoshi by Yoshi Huang

• Students used a formula to determine each group’s live lost to levels won ratio.
• Students analyzed the differences in observed and noted behaviors between the groups with the highest and lowest ratios.
• Students analyzed their own behavior to see if it aligned more with the highest ratio group or the lowest.
• Students identified strategies from the lowest ratio group to try this week in class.
• Students explained how playing the game was like and unlike class.
• Students suggested ways by which they and the teachers could make class more game-like.

Here are some student quotes that caught my eye:

• “It was like class because some succeeded, and some didn’t.”
• “It was more fun than class.”
• “You can fail like in class.”
• “We all need more team work.”
• “We should play on Monday when we need more fun.”

Obviously, I have some hearts and minds work to do here in my allegedly mastery-learning classroom.

This afternoon in class, two usually antagonistic students had this interchange about today’s game play:

Student 1: “Wow.  You did a good job.”
Student 2: “Thank you.”

Maybe my students don’t often compliment one another on their work like that because it’s not relevant enough for them to assess or value it.  Also, I couldn’t engage 2 students with the gaming this week.  More work to do and social learning opportunities to design.

Here’s a comparison of each group’s performance last week and this week:

Group 1 greatly improved positive communication and finished more levels this week than last, but spent a few more lives doing so.  I wonder about how much of the other groups’  improvement is due to reflection about collaboration and how much is due to learning the levels.  I have to think about switching games or levels next week and measuring work in such a way that the qualitative observations on collaboration count for as much as the ratios without making me seem subjective to the students.  Help, PLN! Ideas?

NB: Group 6 consisted of a lone gamer today.  Apparently working alone greatly increases collaboration.