The start of the school year derailed my gaming thinking a bit. Now that the year is launched, my mind is going back that way thanks to some good reads.
I’ve been listing to Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken from Audible.com. She is helping me broaden the scope of the game I want to make for my students. I see now that although my main impetuous was to give them a motivating reason to work on their typing skills, I also want it to be a tool to further their digital citizenship skills and their tech skills. I’d also love it if some happiness hacks fit into it.
I’ve been reading A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Ralph Koster and Will Wright on my iPad. It is a fun read and it is giving me a good overview and some interesting details. I may write about them some other time, but not today.
Last summer I read a bunch of The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game. The book follows writer, game designer and college professor Lee Sheldon’s experiences of teaching his college course as a game. The book was published in spring 2012. I really valued seeing how the game changed from one term to the next to address problems with earlier designs. I found all the vignettes from different classrooms useful and interesting. This book is the most practical of the books I’ve read. Reading how other people’s class games have evolved is helping me think through my own game. I wish this book was available in digital format so that all my notes and highlights were in one easy-to-view place.
I think my main platform will be Edumodo. It will allow my students to only know each other’s screen names. None of our school platforms such as Blackboard or Google Docs would allow that. It also has built in messaging which gets around my students’ lack of email, and built-in badges. I think the kids will like the social networking aspect. I may use the different groups for different strands. However, I will need to front end load more of the digital citizenship stuff. I wouldn’t need to do that so much if the kids didn’t have their own place to post.
I have been told that I can embed google docs into Edmodo. That would be a great way to manage the leader board and make it easy to see. I think parents will like that it is a walled garden. We have a lot of public gardens with our blogs and photos at school. Having a closed one will be useful.
I would love to find a website that helped me create the two super hero guides for the adventures. I’d want to have a few different angles of each, such as standing with arms crossed, pointing towards something. etc. I’d like them to have transparent backgrounds and be in .png or .gif or .jpg format so I could use them in sites, blogs, Google Docs, etc. Anyone know such a place?
I may try to find a HS student interested in creating them for me. I haven’t a clue what a reasonable charge is for that service. Any suggestions?