There are several ways to help uncover students’ talents at making games.

1. First, we can let students play widely. Just as you get better at writing by reading, you get better at designing by playing.
2. Second, we can provide students with an authentic outlet for their writing. Game design and programming require students to show depth in thinking not only about what they want to make, but also about how it will work. It takes iteration, feedback, and reflection to finish alpha, beta, and gold builds of games. It takes the writing process to make a game, and it takes the writing process further than a teacher-described genre or multiple choice question about what comes after prewriting.
3. Third, we can remake our classrooms to feel more like information age workplaces. These workplaces clearly value their workers in ways that classrooms value neither students nor teachers. I’m imagining a place with a lot of natural light, mobile furniture, individual work stations, and a collaborative space filled with inspiration and materials for “reading” and prototyping. There would be several types of tools available for several types of tasks, including maintaining developers’ diaries. It would be okay to eat and drink there. It would be okay to communicate with the outside world there. It would be okay to bring friends and family there to play-test. A GBL space/lab/library space/school-within-a-school/charter would be a workshop that favored collaboration, communication, and spontaneous celebration of failure and success, rather than a classroom that favored competition, monologue, and looming consequence.

Here’s my take on a classroom for games-based learning (GBL). It would include

• Light, color, art: everywhere.
• Modular, mobile furniture.
• Mutable zoning by project.
• A commons area.
• A common multi-monitor screen for streaming and presenting student work, class backchannels, and relevant class texts.
• A dedicated play area.
• Individual work stations.
• A library of excellent texts, including books, films, and games.
• A library of toys.
• Mobile, kid-level planning surfaces.
• Multiple copies of class development platforms, games with authoring tools, and software development kits.
• Mobile communications tools available to every student or hardwired communications tools at every student work station.
• Permissions policies allowing the teacher to manage student communications and publications with relevant experts and entities
• Access to an outdoor campus for play, planning, and mobile computing.
• Differentiated seating.
• Refrigerators and pantries.
• 2D & 3D materials for prototyping and making games and asset models. (Has no one done the custom vinyl figure novel character visualization yet?)
• Architecture and wiring that created discrete sound zones.
• Rotating roles so every kid produces at least 2 design documents, 2 levels authored in other games, and 2 alpha builds of project in something like Scratch.

Teachers across the world would pitch content needs. Students would pitch back concepts and make alpha builds for feedback from their teacher clients, student play-testers, and outside experts. Kids could change projects in a fluid manner to produce the best products possible. Kids from a poorly reviewed alpha could contribute to the beta build of a project favorited by more peers, clients, and experts, improving its quality and/or shortening its development time.

There would be embedded art, engineering, math, workplace readiness and roles, reading, and writing standards in an open-ended curriculum of iterative development in service to others’ learning needs and students’ communities.

Imagine an Urgent Evoke-like game for a kid’s town through a Gowalla-like AR interface.

Who wants to play? What are the bugs?

[Author's note: Thanks for this post's inspiration go to Shelley Blake-Plock (@teachpaperless) of Teach Paperless fame for his crazy stuff challenge, as well as to those who have already commented!]

Gnarls Barkley by Jeremy Farmer Photog

Invert & Green the School Calendar

First, let’s invert the school calendar to promote sustainable food projects and maintain alternatives to food monocultures. If we put Summer Vacation in the middle of winter, we could “start” each school in the spring and plant a diverse-as-possible, locally viable garden or farm per school. Students could work on STEM in agriculture throughout the spring, determining plantable areas, calculating the optimal seed density per crop, engineering systems to help make work more efficient and crop yields higher, and writing the procedures and hypotheses of experiments for summer farming. Summer time could then be spent tending the crops, blogging observations, and calculating and comparing the growth rates and yields of different crops or groups of the same crop planted and/or tended differently. Fall could be spent harvesting and working on recipes and cookbooks to give students work with ratios, copy writing, design, and publishing.

Based on what they learn about their soil, plants, and community needs and wants, students could also research and propose next year’s crops as a summative presentation to peers, teachers, and local farmers. High scoring presentations could be adopted to give students power over what’s planted or to attract partnerships with local farms and garden clubs. Students could donate portions of each crop to local food banks – or bring fresh flowers to senior centers weekly – , market their cookbooks for donations to their schools or local food banks, and participate in – or host - local farmers’ markets, making the school a community center once again.

We could also avoid snow days by adopting this calendar, or perhaps add an opt-in Winter semester of onsite and/or virtual extension and inquiry offerings. We could assign every student a cellular computing device to help with making audio/visual field observations throughout the school year and delivering virtual content in the winter time. If we’re unwilling to scrap an agricultural calendar, let’s re-schedule school to take advantage of it, bringing together information age learning and agricultural entrepreneurship. Urban schools could create summer partnerships with suburban or rural host schools for a summer semester and prepare for farm work by following their partner’s blogs and wikis throughout the year. Urban schools could revitalize community gardens or pursue funding for green roofs to support limited planting.

Turn Schools into Pop Art

Our host school has a giant boulder decorated and signed by members of each year’s exiting 8th grade class. A local high school graffitis a railroad bridge with pro-social messages based on community, choice theory, and reality-therapy. The local university has a bridge anyone can paint so long as they stay the night and maintain a vigil over the work.

Why aren’t we painting more? Why don’t we give our buildings – or apportion huge swaths of their exteriors – to our students? With oversight from a committee of students, teachers, admin, parents, and neighborhood stakeholders, surely we could run STEM and arts design competitions to solicit student proposals for transforming our staid school houses into pieces of pop art. Older students could mentor younger students in determining areas to be covered, the amount and type of paint needed for outdoor use, and in preparing student criteria, design mock-ups, and proposals for review committees. Local history and current events could factor into students’ designs, as could students’ passions and visions of the future. Students could design and propose in the fall, run experiments on paints and surfaces during the winter, and paint in the spring.

Committees could also recruit local artists to serve as pro-bono project managers for student painting. Parent and community volunteers could help students execute their designs.

New schools could be designed as canvases and built according to a schedule that allows incoming students to paint the buildings before they open. Schools no longer need look the same.

Separate Licensure & Certification

Let’s run the background checks and screen the resumes and put together incredible interview questions, but let’s also give principals and local school-boards the power to grant 1-year, project-based licenses to field-tested professionals matched to school needs, renewable for up to 3 years before candidates have to either commit to certification in partnership with their home division, or find another division with which to partner.

Consider mathematics hiring in secondary schools. There seems to be a perpetual shortage of highly qualified math teachers. Let’s allow principals to exercise their judgment in hiring field practitioners who can bring their tools and habits of mind to our classrooms.  Let’s hook the most promising teachers of these professionals on the rewards of working with children and serving the greater good. Let principals match professionals to schools’ needs and initiatives. Give principals the authority to release licensed, uncertified personnel quickly if things don’t work out while giving schools the chance to staff hard to fill positions with content area experts.

Given the dynamic nature of our work and the financial enticements of admin and private-sector jobs, career teachers are invaluable and must be supported in their professional development and retained. We also need to create more of them and let the profession evolve to retain them. In the meantime, we have a generation of students depending on us to provide them with an authentic education that connects their inseparably lives to learning. I say we give exemplar professionals living in our communities a shot at sharing that work with us.