Run, Sandwich, Run! is a platformer in which you play a sandwich running from its predators. You wake up in a sandwich shop or a street-food cart or truck and begin running from your maker and his or her customers. As you run further and further away, other people and animals catch your scent and [...]
Out past the printed word are dozens of modes of expression available to our students. Just as school devalues play, it devalues the accumulation of unsanctioned knowledge and “critical” thought. Standards and scores are deck chairs. Moreover, reading and writing – perhaps, one day, even as embodied by coding – will all be done through [...]
A few tweets about the upcoming Games for Change Festival in New York City brought me into contact with Jeff Ramos, the G4C Community and Content Manager. While I can’t attend this year’s event, my interest is piqued. To get an idea of the kind of work G4C supports, check out this year’s list of [...]
This week a student designed a project to learn the conventions of video game reviews. He decided to review the multi-player co-op mode of Portal 2, a new physics-based puzzler mixing teleportation, mad science, and a strangely endearing passive-aggressive, maniacal artificial intelligence.
We negotiated the project in that I asked him not to play the single-player [...]
Our games-based #engchat on the ramification of language arts is almost here! I’m so happy and grateful to be joining you at 7 PM EST on Monday, March 21st, to talk about how games and game mechanics can inform teaching and learning.
Over the past few months as I’ve planned and read for this #engchat, my [...]
I watched a video game trailer last week – an amazing one – that raised for me this bevy of non-rhetorical questions:
Are my kids collaborating on anything, let alone a multi-media project?
Am I acknowledging and asking kids to use their non-print talents in my classroom?
Am I admitting in my teaching that print speaks to other [...]
Here are more game-based learning resources in anticipation of our March 21st #engchat on Gamification in the Language Arts Classroom.
Bibliobouts – team-based citation and media-literacy game.
“Could BiblioBouts, an online sourcing game for academia, offer lessons for media literacy?” – a Nieman Journalism Lab write-up of Bibliobouts.
An Edutopia write-up of last year’s Games for Change festival.
“Games [...]
What do we talk about when we talk about games?
We carry around really idiosyncratic and sometimes competing notions of games. When we hear someone talking about games, some of us think about children’s games. Some of us think about board games. Some of us think about sports. Some of us think about card games. Some [...]
School is a lot like a board game, but today’s best games aren’t like school. Game designers have found ways to embed mastery learning in flow-inducing experiences that offer learners increasingly self-directed opportunities for goal-setting and problem solving. Moreover, game designers have found ways to provide near constant feedback to learners. Customization is another hallmark [...]
Last year I spent Winter Break reading two wildly disparate books about child-parent relationships gone bad. This year I played Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story on my iPad – and read #blog4reform (you should, too).
Game Dev Story puts you in charge of a game development company. You develop games and fulfill contracts in pursuit of [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
