Macroinvertebrate ID by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Midwest Region

Jeff asked me if I’d be interested in learning more about the festival and writing about it. I was, so I am.

In particular, I remain struck by the list of speakers that Jeff sent me – the online list is here.

I love game-based learning. I love the arts. I want to get better at inspiring students to take on service-based learning. I’m a fan of student entrepreneurship and invention, STEM and otherwise, if things should really be disentangled anymore. And I’m a teacher. In reflecting on my interests and profession, as I look at the list of G4C speakers and their credentials, I am of two minds.

First, wow. What a gathering of smart. smart people, including many heroes of mine. I am profoundly gladdened that these people are coming together to figure out how play can help make sure that more and more children and adults across the world can lead lives in which play is less endangered and in which survival is more assured. I’m curious about the participation of some organizations like the World Bank and United States Department of Education – I look forward to following the #G4C2011 tag and learning more about the perspective and contributions of each speaker, organization, and company.

Second, wow. Where are the teachers? I don’t mean that rhetorically. I’m genuinely curious about why there aren’t more teachers presenting about the games-based work that they do with students. Where on the list of speakers are the John Hunters of the world? What obstacles exist in recruiting such teachers – or any teacher – to speak, and what obstacles exist in positioning teachers as viable participants in such technological, entrepreneurial and political conversations?

To put it another way: why aren’t (most) teachers a labor base for educational entrepreneurs, technologists, or politicians? Or, why aren’t educational innovators hiring away their favorite teachers?

There isn’t a tidy answer to any of those questions. Our reasons for staying in the classroom or leaving it are legion, and they make us feel like Legion as we mull over them.

I am convinced that public school teachers in the United States can change their classrooms, which may be a more Herculean task then changing the world. I am convinced that teachers can do a better job of partnering with businesses doing good. I am convinced that divisions can do a better job of creating information age jobs for teachers, as teaching, as we think of it and value it as a system, is becoming more and more obsolete.

As a professional body, are we not working on games – or classroom or school designs or cafeteria food – for change because we haven’t chosen to, or because we haven’t been invited to? Because the job keeps us from it? The job will keep us from a lot of things as time quantum teleports onward into our kids’ future.

So, let’s play the New Teaching Game. To play:

1. Brainstorm a whole bunch of ideas for new teaching in your classroom or our classrooms. The sky is the limit – brainstorm without boundaries and puzzle out practicalities later.
2. Pick a few favorites to explore further and sketch their outlines.
3. Pick your favorite idea that you explored, and make a prototype of it – some kind of model or artifact that represents it. Use your favorite app – pencil and paper, Minecraft, HTMLPad, Flickr, iMovie, clay, a 4-track, Legos, a garden, VoiceThread; you choose.
4. Digitize your prototype for sharing.
5. By June 30th, share out your prototype and any earlier work that you want to publish using the #newteaching hash-tag on Twitter.
6. Remix feedback and inspiration into new teaching for next year.

Show us what you want the job of teaching to be. As John Hunter’s first supervisor asked him, “What do you want to do?” Who do you want to be? how do you want to work with others? Consider this the Minecraft of teaching. Craft something new from the blocks you see, or change the texture pack, or run an inventory hack, or open up an AutoCAD mod – this game is not inside the game.

If teaching is to survive, how should it do so?

Teachers, students, parents, admin, entrepreneurs, technologists, politicians – learners – play along and please post links to your “moves” in the comments.

Inspire us to play with our work. And feel free to disregard my techno/gaming bias – share your vision as it you see it, with our without technology (or teachers).

I imagine a lot of us are proctoring tests right now. Why not dedicate a few paces to change and put together a move by the end of June? That would give us July and part of August to enact the moves that inspire us.

Join in and look out for #newteaching!

Minecraft Pixel Map by Andrew Mason

We negotiated the project in that I asked him not to play the single-player campaign in class so it wouldn’t be spoiled for me. Relationships come first in the games-based classroom.

The student wrote his design document about what he would do, how he would do it, why he wanted to undertake this project, and what he expected to learn from it. The second piece of writing produced from the project will be his review, modeled after online video-game reviews from the publications he reads when deciding whether or not to buy a game. On the way towards that project, he’s playing through the co-op campaign with different classmates as they complete their own work and have some time to sacrifice for games-based learning.

In watching students play Portal 2, and in looking back at our work with the Wii, iCivics, Minecraft, and experiments with works like Civilization IV, I’m beginning to think about somewhat formalized ways to use games to assess students’ learning and social behaviors.

I think it would be great to use games to help develop a learning profile for each student willing to play them.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• Take any first person console or PC game using a controller with dual analog sticks – or take the Wiimote and connect it to the off-hand nunchuck peripheral. Watch a student play with the controller. Is he or she able to use both sticks effectively to look around while moving, or does he or she primarily use one stick at a time? If he or she uses one stick at a time, which is it? Does it match up to the students’ right- or left-handedness? Does the student look at the controller or at the screen while looking and moving? How can this observation be used to assess hand-eye coordination and right/left independence? Can you find a student with musical or sculptural aptitude by observing their hands on a controller? Can you set up physical education activities and light occupation therapy practice for kid who experiences developmentally inappropriate difficulty handling a controller?

• Drop a gamer into Minecraft, or any sandbox game that doesn’t intimidate the player with its complexity (I’m thinking of the Civilization, Sim City, and Sims franchises here). Observe the student’s play. Does he or she immediately start exploring? Does he or she immediately set some kind of goal and begin working toward it? Does he or she ask for help with the rules or purpose of the game? Does he or she balk or become defensive or critical of the game when he or she finds out that there is no purpose or traditional rule set? Can you determine kids’ comfort levels with project-based learning and self-directed learning from observing them at play in sandbox games? Can you assess a student’s level of intrinsic motivation and/or dependence on extrinsic motivation based on his or her reaction to a game-like environment without traditional rules or score-keeping? As an aside, can you identify students with systems and architecture aptitudes from sandbox games?

• In some kind of level-based platformer or puzzler, pair up a student playing with purpose and a student playing just to play or to hang out with a friend. Observe how the two players negotiate their relationship. Who leads? Who influence the other’s play style? Who coöpts whom to play with or without purpose? How do the players resolve their differences in motivation and purpose? How do they problem-solve? Whose ideas are tried in what order and balance? Can you assess students’ aptitudes for leadership, collaboration, and problem-solving from observing such pairings?

I also have some slowly coalescing thoughts about hacking, which in this case means running or installing a program that lets the player assign his or her avatar resources and characteristics that are normally achieved through gameplay or not enabled in the game proper. My students routinely hack Minecraft to build what they want to build. Some run hacks to pad their inventories with the tools and materials they want to use. However, I’m most interested in the work of students running hacks to change the game’s texture packs and to make the game into something else. Using a hack called MCEdit, several students are now loading their Minecraft saves into MCEdit, which is essentially an AutoCad environment that lets players terraform their world and build large-scale structures.

One student wrote a design document and listed to audio copies of Greek myths and the Iliad while building a model of the Parthenon at a 1′ to 1 bock ratio inside MCEdit.

There’s a golden creeper statue inside.

But what happens when the best way to accomplish your self-directed goal inside a sandbox game is to hack the game? Is the future of game-based learning – and problem-solving and collaboration – in helping one another change the rules of a game to suit our goals? Has that always been the game for the elite at school and in society? How do we help students hack the right things? How do we agree on the right things to hack, because isn’t the Internet a hack for the way school is right now?

Hacking contributes to transparency, wider access to success, and a wider definition of what’s permissible in a system. It can also obfuscate, limit, and constrain.

Why aren’t we teaching it? What does a kindergarten hack look like? How can boys hack middle school? How can disadvantaged schools hack resources? How can we constructively, ethically, and legally hack testing, scheduling, and staffing? What other questions should we be hacking?

100 Cupcakes Game by Z Andrei

Over the past few months as I’ve planned and read for this #engchat, my understanding of how to talk about and use games for learning has most certainly benefitted from discussions with many friends and colleagues. Thank you all.

Here are the four questions I come back to regarding games-based learning and gamification in the classroom:

1. Which games should go on our reading lists? Why do the belong there?
2. What is gaming literacy and how does it overlap with the design elements of writing, inquiry, and project-based work?
3. How should our protocols look for curating and using games in media centers and classrooms?
4. Which elements of game design, gameplay, and user experience should we use in the language arts classroom?

I hope you’ll join us on the 21st in sharing your responses to those questions and in posing new questions to the community.

Game industry visionary Jesse Schell (@jesseschell) will be joining us, as will Bethesda Softworks’s Shane Liesegang (@OptimistPanda) – if he can get time away from his project. A few more invitations are pending.

If you’re looking for background knowledge on games-based learning, I wholeheartedly recommend Jane McGonigal’s (@avantgame) Reality is Broken. You can find past posts about our gaming #engchat here.

Before I head off to teach this morning, let me pass along two more links shared with me by Cindy Minnich.

• A WSJ article on using SMART goals in schools and sports.
• The Great Gatsby for NES.

Happy teaching, learning, and gaming.

• 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 media? To the heart?
• Am I allowing students to specialize?
• Am I teaching my kids anything about programming or the problem-solving habits that go along with it?
• Am I balancing chunked instruction with lasting, uninterrupted time for discovery and self-expression?
• What amount of time do my students spend on print-based screen activities versus non-print ones? On replicative versus creative activities? On passive versus active ones?
• Will my students make anything that makes me cry or stare on wonder?
• Will the best three minutes of our time together be any kind of masterpiece?
• Am I caving again to what I think are the expectations others have of me?

I want to know....by mod as hell

Another way to put it:

What is digital literacy and what will it teach me about teaching?

• 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 are lessons, just less fun” – a post from Dean Groom on tapping into students’ functional literacies from games.
• Globaloria – a social network for web-based Flash game development; looks like it’s aimed at states, divisions, and schools ready to develop their own materials
• Learning Games Network – an effort to connect teachers and developers in making and using quality games for learning.
• Star Logo TNG – a 3D Scratch?
• Two takes on Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, one more optimistic than the other.

And here’s the classic end-credits song from Portal, “Still Alive,” just because. Why not ask kids to write songs about failing forward from the POV of video game characters, those brave denizens of digital purgatory?

Thanks to edReformer (@edReformer) and Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie) for many of the links.

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 of us think about collectible card games. Some of us think about dice games. Some of us think about d20 games.

I think that our experiences with games are as varied as our experiences with school. Moreover, our experiences with games produce really visceral reactions when we’re asked to think about using games in the classroom.

Some of us think of games as rewards, Some of us think about games as sub plans. Some of us think about games for learning, but because we have such different notions of what good learning looks like, we have different notions of what good learning games are. Somebody comfortable with a Jeopardy-style review game might not be ready to teach an entire economics unit – first time through – using just Monopoly. Somebody comfortable with teaching an entire economics unit through Monopoly might not be comfortable with letting students compose an informational text inside of a video game engine using sandbox tools. Somebody comfortable letting students compose informational texts inside of one video game might not be comfortable letting students write a book report or critical essay on the single-player plot or multi-player politics of some other video game.

We can make such distinctions based on teacher experience and professional sense. Teachers who don’t look at games as learning aren’t likely to use them as such. Teachers willing to use games for learning aren’t likely to use games with which they’re unfamiliar. Teachers familiar with many games useful for learning make choices about which to allow in the classrooms depending on their curricula, students, purposes, and community standards.

Moreover – and there’s no nice way to say this – teachers who don’t like their students or who disparagingly equate engagement with babysitting won’t use games – or any other form of authentic work or radical differentiation – for learning.

That being said, let me share with you what I’m talking about when I talk about games for learning.

Primarily, but not exclusively, I’m talking about video games and sandbox or toy-like apps.

Specifically, I’m talking about games that allow and encourage players

• To set their own goals.
• To discover their own problem-solving strategies through trial and error.
• To establish their own conditions for success.
• To communicate with specific vocabulary about their accomplishments and frustrations.
• To teach one another – in pro-social ways – new behaviors that help in mastering the game and/or creating and learning with it.
• To evaluate their decisions, other players’ decisions, and programmers’ decisions.
• To learn the cause-and-effect relationships between in-game objects and their behaviors.
• To learn basic programming with sandbox tools and visual programming platforms.
• To draw comparisons and distinctions between the game and real life.
• To form their own opinions about real-world problems and events depicted in-game.
• To engage in inquiry-driven reading and writing before, during, and after game-play in response to the learning associated with the game.
• To demonstrate learning through the creation of something new or mastery of a specific game mechanic.
• To learn to read a variety of in-game interfaces as informational texts giving them feedback on what they need to do to accomplish their goals.
• To provide in-game evidence of self-directed learning following a design document written and workshopped as a kind of experimental design before game-play.
• To provide post-game evidence of content-based learning through writing.
• To wonder how to read code.
• To wonder how code is written and transformed from text to experience.

That’s a big list, and I hope that some of my past and future posts provide clearer examples of what I’m talking about, I hope also that this list inspires you to ask questions and bring recommendations to the comments below and to our March 21st #engchat.

Gaming for learning is a design process that unites the enjoyment of mastering a game with the enjoyment of mastering learning.

Gaming for learning isn’t about letting kids play Angry Birds on their smart phones during class so long as they’re quiet (unless, you know, the kids are plotting parabolae or something), and it shouldn’t be dismissed as such, either,

Game designers concern themselves with fun in ways that educators do not; however, the primary aims of both public education in the United States and the game industry are exactly the same:

• Both industries want their consumers to adopt new behaviors. Games teach through gameplay and feedback; schools teach through teaching and feedback. While games depend on the player to learn from them, schools are largely set-up to depend on teachers to teach.
• Both industries want repeat business. Game designers want their games to sell so that they have the resources and justification to make new games to sell to their fan base; schools want their graduates to excel so that they are given the resources and vindication to educate the next generation like the last.

While I can see the game industry slowing down console development to speed up game development and maximize profits through the synergy of new peripherals with old hardware, for now the game industry clearly has the edge in what I consider to be one of the single most powerful learning innovations of our time:

Fun.

How powerful is fun? I think about my students who struggle to memorize the times tables, but master new games in moments. I think about my students who still don’t routinely or accurately capitalize, but have no problem with the grammar and syntax of button sequences. I think about my students who struggle with reading comprehension, but deliver encyclopedic summaries of games’ plots, systems, and characterizations. I think about my students who have resisted self-starting school work for year, but who embrace new challenges in games and routinely teach others the strategies and tricks they have discovered. I think about my students who rush through writing, but spend hours tweaking the characters and levels they create with in-game tools.

We could argue that games appeal to students because they are auditory, visual and kinesthetic, but we’ve all tried auditory, visual and kinesthetic activities that have fallen flat because we stopped designing at that modal level of differentiation, relying on novelty to carry the day. Game designers go a step further and ask how the auditory, visual and kinetic (and sometimes textual) can be made fun, especially when games rely on players to find novel applications for a finite set of sounds, pictures, and gameplay mechanics.

On March 21st, 2011, I’ll host an #engchat on gamification – or perhaps “applied gaming” – in the language arts classroom. Gamification is the application of gameplay mechanics to real world tasks in an effort to change human behavior by taking advantage of our need for fun. Companies use gamification to change consumer behavior through fun. I’d like to ask how teachers can do the same.

I recognize and acknowledge the extrinsic ends of gamification, and I hope that we discuss how to reconcile the use of gamification in schools with the intrinsic motivation that we know drives the most personally meaningful learning. For what it’s worth, I see my students initially attracted to games by ads and word-of-mouth, but I see them stick with games and game culture out of a common, intrinsic drive to master games that they evaluate as worthy of their time. I’m really eager to talk about the ethics of fun and game-design in classroom design and management, as well as in unit- and lesson-planning. How different are achievements and badges from grades? How are they used differently? How is feedback delivered in-game different from that delivered in a traditional class? I think we’ll find that beneath some rather superficial similarities, the how and why of game-based assessment and motivation differ greatly from traditional practices in public schools.

What we do is not fun. Why is that? What can we learn from games if we decide that our work should be fun? Should school be no fun, not ever? What about the language arts classroom? What’s the difference between using games for learning, like using iCivics and Monopoly for a Civics & Economics class, and designing class and/or school to be more game-like? Are game-development and programming acceptable forms of authorship in school? Is playing a game an acceptable form of readership if the student produces response, review, and/or criticism? If so, how should schools curate games and/or resource their authorship?

Check back at Classroots.org for related posts over the next few months, check out this #ncte11 proposal on gamification, and join us on March 21st, 2011, for an #engchat on game design in the language arts classroom – no language arts jacket required.

For readers interested in learning more about gamification from the pros, check out these links, too:

• Avant Game: gaming for a better world with Jane McGonigal.
• Bruce on Games: Bruce Everiss’s industry-analysis blog, useful for thinking about how games are distributed all around, but seldom through, school.
• coding conduct: research and presentations on “persuasive design” and gamification from Sebastian Deterding.
• Design for Learning: Dean Groom’s blog on games, virtual environments, and learning.
• Epic Win and Mindbloom: two examples of gamified life-management apps.
• Foursquare and Gowalla: two examples of location-based gamification apps.
• Game Dev Story: a fun little app that captures a very rough sketch of the gaming industry, it’s decision-making, costs, and career paths.
• “Gamification Needs to Level Up — Here’s How”: an article about next steps in gamification (and maybe learning design).
• “Happy 2011: Celebrating frontiers in Game Design”: a great post from the awesome Lost Garden blog about where we are in gaming.
• Gamepocalypse Now: quick posts about gamification examples and resources from Jesse Schell.
• iCivics: an example of blended, game-based learning mixing civics games and traditional curriculum; Do I Have a Right? is a student favorite.
• Progress Wars: a satire of gaming – and role-playing games in particular – that sums up arguments against gaming.
• Tom Barrett’s games-based learning posts on his edte.ch blog.
• Wikipedia entries on Flow and Gamificiation

And here are a few app, game- and level-authoring resources:

• The Android Developer page.
• Atmosphir, an online 3D platform game maker.
• The iOS Development Center from Apple for mobile apps.
• Kodu from Microsoft
• Little Big Planet 2 homepage.
• Part 1 of Kevin Hodgson’s cool “Making a Video Game” series.
• Scratch from MIT.
• Wikipedia list of games with level editors.

For anyone interested in our experiments with gaming in the language arts classroom, you can read more about them here.

Have fun reading, learning, exploring, and making.

Please add your favorite games, examples of game-based learning, and gamificiation-in-the-classroom resources below, along with any questions, comments, and/or rebuttals you have!

Game Dev Story puts you in charge of a game development company. You develop games and fulfill contracts in pursuit of industry awards, as well as the cash and research points necessary to recruit and develop workers and to license and develop more games and consoles. I enjoyed the game immensely, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t completely portray the complexities and operations of the game industry. Nevertheless, Game Dev Story does at least introduce its players to the kinds of decisions developers make regarding game mechanics, genres, and consoles. Plus, it’s full of puns and malapropisms, just like me.

How would Lesson Planning Story or School Management Story play by comparison? Would anyone even want to make either of those games for an audience in the United States of America? Would either game be released in the United States as anything but a satire?

Would you produce such a game knowing that you would have to trade off accurately portraying the complexities of public schooling in America in return for introducing players to broad tensions we face in running schools and designing learning opportunities in classrooms? How far could a little gamer education go for public education in our country?

What can a funny little app teach our casual gaming citizenry about education?

If you’d like to explore making a school or lesson development story – if that last question excites you – let me know. I’d contribute art and/or writing pro bono. We could at least launch a development blog for some vaporware.

it’s easy to visualize a classroom overlay atop Game Dev Story. It’s hard to imagine players in the United States of America caring, but perhaps that’s a shame a popular iPhone app could address.

Here’s a before painting that I especially like; it makes me question my wisdom – and rights – in asking students to paint over their work for the sake of a lesson on colonization.

A lake and some light painted by a middle-schooler

Regarding games: at the beginning of the colonization unit, only a few students began playing Civilization IV: Colonization. Moreover, since only one student who started the game geeked out enough to enjoy it, it’s been shelved in favor of Minecraft. (Next time we paint Minecraft landscapes! FTW!)

I heart Minecraft more than any other game I’ve taught. It’s easy to learn and difficult to master, even on peaceful mode (no zombies at night means no lost student work). It lets students craft their own narratives along with their homes and tunnels and train tracks. It is intensely personal and sculptural and communicates in a visual vocabulary of consumption, crafting, and reuse that gives kids genuine feelings of exploration, economy, and accomplishment.

You have to play it. If you love it, you can buy an account – accounts are transferrable and allow simultaneous use on multiple machines. Use the wiki for help. Check out a tutorial video. Imagine what kids can do with the game, as well what they can learn and show through it. With a little more coding to increase the number of variables under user control, Minecraft could be a more ludic hybrid of Scratch and Second Life that puts students into the flow of learning-by-making more quickly than either of those other platforms.

So what are we doing with it?

First, we’re exploring. Every instance of the game builds a different world for its player that runs as deep underground as its mountains reach into the sky . One student gasped when he found this “Natural Bridge.”

A student-discovered "Natural Bridge" in Minecraft

Here’s a view from the top:

Looking down from the top of a student-discovered "Natural Bridge" in Minecraft

Second, we’re settling. The student who found the bridge is going to build his colony here. Students generated a list of buildings that they thought early colonists needed, and I asked them to build any five near spots in their worlds that were well resourced for human life and industry. Students suggested that they build homes, fences for defense, farms, blacksmith shops, lumber mills, barracks, ports, and town halls. It’s been cool to see students figure out how to make furnaces for their blacksmiths’ shops and crafting tables for their lumber mills.

My brilliant TA is busy figuring out how to set up a server on which all of our students can play and settle together. We’d like to host a world in which our kids can launch and record virtual expeditions and create New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern colonies as part of our history classes; we’d also like to host a world of shared responsibility for a virtual economy in our civics class.

In language arts this week we’re working on topic, main idea, and supporting details – the sacrosanct trinity of standardized informational text reading comprehension questions. I’ve been attempting to differentiate for my boys by throwing in excerpts from passages about the new Tron movie and our invisible pal, dark Jupiter. Apparently I failed horribly because somehow today we wound up watching videos about volcanoes.

I figured, eh, what the hell? Reading, making, playing, and communicating matter more than my best guesses at engaging material.

We’ve decided to complete our own topic, main idea, and supporting details organizers on volcanoes and to use Minecraft to model what we learn. Each participating student is going to complete an organizer on one type of volcano – shield cone, cider cone, or stratovolcano. Then each boy is going to outfit his Minecraft avatar for an underground expedition with torches, ladders, blank signs, and brown floor tiles crafted by the students in-game. Each student will dig down to the magma layer, channel the magma to illustrate the inside of a volcano, lay down brown floor tile to model the outside of the volcano, and then post his topic, main idea, and supporting details on signs around the volcano. (If only they knew, “You shall not pass!”)

Descending to find magma in Minecraft

Outfitted for an underground inquiry adventure in Minecraft

We’re writing inquiry reports underground in a 3D engine and illustrating them with in-engine 2D volcano mosaics.

I love my job. I hope the vinegar and baking soda come next – and that the Skyping with volcanologists follows shortly thereafter.

We shouldn’t needlessly complicate instruction with technology, but we should definitely follow students’ learning underground when the stuff on the surface of schooling only amounts to so much dross.

Our own work in class to master Mario Kart as cooperative cycling teams has hit a kind of instructional equilibrium: everyone is happy to play, but the teams who have mastered the rotating 1-2-3-4 finish have mastered it, and the teams who have not mastered it have not. It’s clearly time to share before we play again. The meta-game might shift, though, from finishing 1-2-3-4 to coaching another team to do the same.

In other news, I’m adopting a US History I class this week filled with 6th and 7th graders. So far this year, I’ve only taught our 8th graders, so I’m thrilled with – and grateful for – the chance to work with all of our students.

I’ve decided to pick up with a re-framing of settlement, exploration, and colonization as a series of human decisions rather than a textual set of records.

To do so, I’m using two games – Civilization IV: Colonization and Minecraft – to present kids with the opportunities and conflicts inherent in trying to claim land from other people and nature.

The two games have a radically different amount of text. Civilization IV: Colonization is text- and infographic-heavy on the user-end. Minecraft is virtually without printed language, apart from its menu and code.

Together the games are like a picture-book/novel pairing from a language arts class, the former useful for scaffolding the themes in the latter. I didn’t think of teaching them this way until now, but maybe I’ll try that approach with another group later this year.

This week I’m going to invite students to pair up and pick the game each pair wants to play. The shared goal between games is to create a settlement that can sustain itself independently from the games’ variables in geography, resources, and competing AI. I’ve worked with my TA, an avid gamer, to develop before, during, and after questions about natural resources, conflict, justice, colonization, and the opportunity costs of students’ decisions.

Maybe I’ll even bust out Settlers of Catan for the table-top set.

I’ll post more later after students have a chance to learn from and reflect on the games.

I’m kind of sad that I downloaded the games. I want boxes or cases to put on our bookshelves next to our history books or atlases. I wonder how far we are from 1:1 consoles, game-design labs and spaces in media centers, and video games shelved with books. I could put our copies of Settlers of Catan on the shelves and see if any kids dare me to accept playing time as reading.

If you’re teaching history with other games, I’d love to hear from you, especially regarding games that independently problematize colonization and provide opportunities to play from indigenous points of view.

Moreover, if you have some suggestions for high quality, less complex colonial simulations, please pass them on to us. I worry about early rage-quits with the learning curves in these games; nevertheless, I expect us to have fun together learning how to play them.

What should we go and do in the real world in response to our learning about colonization?