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Programming Visual Media
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Games and learning
Go back to: General discussion
I know we have a number of educators in this group who are interested in educational value of playing and building games, so I wanted to set up an area for you to share related thoughts and links.
I'll start...
- The New York Times just published an great article about the Quest to Learn school. Definitely worth reading: Learning by Playing: Video Games in the Classroom
- Katie Salen, the founder (I believe) of the Quest to Learn school, was also involved in creating Gamestar Mechanic, a website that based around fixing "broken" games, just opened for beta testing. "Gamestar Mechanic is a game-based digital learning platform designed to teach the guiding principles of game design and systems thinking in a highly engaging and creative environment."
- Finally, the National STEM Video Game Challenge was just announced last week. There's a special Youth Prize track for middle school students (grades 5-8) to enter the competition by designing original video games, with a $50,000 prize pool. Games built with Sketchpad are eligible to enter, as are paper-based game designs.
What else?
This from The Atlantic might also be of interest: Can Video Games Be Journalism. The article makes the point (with examples) that games are particularly good at teaching systems, offering an "experience of how something works rather than a description of key events and players."
Quest to Learn's classroom style reminded me of this blog: http://gamingtheclassroom.wordpress.com/
Seemed to me like the class described in the blog was just a standard class with a different facade. I always felt like there should be more reward for "quests" and "leveling" than just experience and a grade.