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?

When you check-in, you can leave a comment and/or post a photo with a comment. You get a stamp on your virtual passport for checking in, and you get pins for various accomplishment like taking a certain number of pictures or checking in for the first time in a new state. At some locations you can get items left there by other users or by Gowalla or its partners.

You can drop your collected items for others to find at the same spot. You can vault your collected items into your permanent collection and then carry around extras to trade or drop when you create locations.

Gowalla also lets you create trips of up to 20 locations for others to follow. Gowalla’s partners have also made trips and left items redeemable for real world rewards.

The app lets you friend your friends and it sends out push notifications to them whenever you check in at a new location.

It’s a fun app. I also think it’s a great tool for education.

Imagine a school full of friended users checking-in at the end of each class with an observation or question about the lesson. Imagine if they took snap-shots of themselves smiling, stone-faced, or frowning to give their teachers visual feedback about their understanding of the day’s learning objective, or if they took a picture of their work for parents following the class.

Imagine delivering – or co-developing with students – schedules via Gowalla. Imagining analyzing student check-ins to find emergent schedules.

Imagine an inquiry-based school with decentralized apprenticeships. Imagine community partners setting up trips for apprentices to follow in completing their hours. Imagine those partners leaving pins and items for students finishing their apprenticeships in good standing. Imagine those partners giving students items for redeemable for real world services that students could share with folks in need through service organizations. Imagine students creating their own trips recording their inquiry learning and leaving those trips on the Gowalla servers for like-minded students to follow in later years. Imagine items redeemable for gifted texts and projects that help learning along the way. Imagine a cohort of mentors and friends watching one another learn and sharing the locations of powerful learning opportunities outside the classroom before, during, and after school. Imagine Gowalla as a mobile, social, student-sourced course content container, albeit one that needs some voice and sketching functionality.

Gowalla is about community and place and how a networked community overlays and interacts within a virtual geography vaster than any territory that “belongs” to an individual member. This is a powerful model for teaching and learning – for sharing ourselves over time and space with people we can help, as well as for leaving a record of how we learned. These curricula of place can serve as gifts to others and as a testament to how hard we tried to move learning out of the factories.

Friend me at chadsansing. Let’s start cacheing our learning outside the classroom.

Super Mario Brothers Candy by sonson

Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.

• Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
• Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with the fewest lives lost in 20 minutes.
• A teacher kept track of lives lost and levels won on a graphic organizer and took notes, as well, about groups’ pro- and anti-social behavior.
• Lives could also be lost on paper for trash-talking.
• Trash-talking was addressed whenever it occurred, and serial trash-talkers were asked to stop playing.
• The group with the lowest lives lost to levels won ratio was awarded 3 lunch periods on the Wii.

Here are our results (lives lost:levels beat, reduced to the lowest equivalent ratio):

• Group 1 – 10:1
• Group 2 – 6:1
• Group 3 – 50:1
• Group 4 – 22: 1
• Group 5 – 15:1
• Group 6 – 10:1

Here are comments from the groups with the lowest and highest ratios, respectively:

• Comments from Group 2: “Backed up to easier levels; good teamwork and talk; [Student A] led them through the levels and made sure all followed.”
• Comments from Group 3: “Students fought each other and never started working together.”

I can see that Group 3 needs some social stories work before playing together again, and that the difference between Groups 2 and 3 wasn’t necessarily the amount of communication, but the type of communication that went on between group members.  Before the next contest, I’ll use the data and observations from this activity to pose questions for students about the value of strategic thinking, positive communication, and leadership to social learning.  To help make the discussion more personally meaningful to students, I might begin by asking students to figure out the ratios and results from the data after I make it anonymous.

What do you think?  Does the competition undercut the collaboration?  Is the reward appropriate? I’ll follow up later so we can see where the activity goes and whether or not it impacts soft-skills and collaboration in the classroom.