developing schools, curriculum around gamers, game design
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
Playing Spore on iPod Touch.
On an admittedly small scale, we are working with a single middle school science teacher and her class to design an endogenous game experience with Spore. Our ambition is to take a gradual approach by working a lesson plan at a time and then expanding to other topics, classrooms, and schools.
Of course, there are those who are much more ambitious, which is the case of Quest to Learn (Q2L). As the mission statement notes, Quest balances:
traditional academic needs with the reality that students today can and do learn in different ways, often through work with digital media, games, online networks, and mobile technologies…Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.
This sounds like a very timely, well-conceived plan for teaching middle and high school students in the 21st century. It will certainly provide an interesting case study and petri dish for many of the theoretical principles and design statements being covered in our class. Also, it will be interesting to compare our small efforts in rural southwest Virgina to the urban setting of New York City.
