In my recently adopted US history class, we’re thinking about the price of colonization. After comparing and contrasting some before and after pics of New York, we’re painting our own unspoiled landscapes based on photographs found online. Thereafter we’re going to make lists of everything that we’d bring along with us to start new colonies. [...]
Tweeps near and far have me thinking about the game layer, gamification, and how to curate games in the classroom or school library.
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 [...]
Gowalla is a augmented reality (AR) social exploration app that lets you pick up, drop, and trade virtual items as you check-in or become the founder of various locations. I used it at #ncte10 last week so my wife and kids could make sure I was in sessions and not at Disney World, where I [...]
If we can teach kids to make fun learning games (fun can indeed be measured, and learning can indeed be fun), then we’ll be helping them create experiential learning opportunities for others that have characteristics of narrative (plot, characterization) and informational texts (GUI, games manuals), as well as scripted expository texts that rely heavily on [...]
“Games are not fun because they’re games, but when they are well designed.”
- Sebastian Deterding, “Pawned”
Games futurist Jesse Schell of Gamepocalypse Now recently pointed towards two presentations by “gamification” researcher Sebastian Deterding: “Just add points?” and “Pawned.” Taken together Deterding’s presentations offer useful insight into contemporary game design and the elements, like fun, that we [...]
We started our study of the Cold War last week with a video called “Pretty Much the Cold War.” Imagine Napoleon Dynamite narrating Dr. Strangelove and you get the picture.
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 [...]
Here are four student perspectives on our soft-skills work with New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
Playing the Wii is not kind of silly. We play the Wii because of teamwork…. We’re a team what will stay alive and we don’t tell each other to say shut up or to get out of the game. [...]
This week three girls took up what might be the most ambitious project I’ve ever suggested to a student: create a World War II museum in LittleBigPlanet, a PlayStation 3 (PS3) game. None of us has any idea what to expect (apart from students somehow sharing the unit’s content through visualization and gameplay) – the [...]
This week we spent some time Thursday coming up with teamwork and game-play strategies for our Friday Wii collaboration contest.
Results of our strategizing were mixed with only half the groups improving from last week to this week. At this point I’m wishing I had taken a research-design course sometime in the past decade so I [...]
Our impromptu two week vacation at the beginning of February did little for our teamwork. It seems like we need to be together to practice cooperating.
Or, really, do we? If we had a social network (or better used our existing Edmodo network) or virtual day set up, couldn’t student teams compete with [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
