This is fantastic, Ryan! Both I and the other technology education
teacher (my first year there were two of us) at the private school I
left did major units on game design. In my case, it was a way of
working on critical thinking skills (your idea, as well, I see!),
problem solving skills and social skills. Students worked in groups to
modify an existing game or to create their own game. I allowed them to
modify existing games because of the population I was working with... I
was at a private school for children with special needs, and within the
school, had the groups (mostly boys!) with the most severe emotional and
behavioral disabilities. These kids didn't leave their classrooms, so I
taught Tech Ed on a cart! That was tons of fun when we had the blizzard
in February and then all the rain we had that spring, because half of my
kids were in a totally separate building! In any case, the other
teacher had obtained a reusable kit for designing a board game, but I'm
afraid I don't remember the name of the kit. The projects were
interesting to most of the kids, but they infinitely preferred PLAYING
the games I brought in (Fluxx, Mille Bournes, Pit, Uno, Mastermind,
Sett, Rack-O, Life, and MouseTrap) to creating their own.
Magi
miyu wrote:
Nothing is set in stone yet so no quoting me on the main page of the
site :p
This morning I heard second hand that when working on the master
schedule for the year after next when my school changes from a Junior
High (grades 7-9) to a Middle School (grades 6-8) that I have a good
probability of having a 9 weeks class on developing critical thinking
skills. The course will be based on developing critical thinking
skills through board games. This means that I will have this summer
to draw up a good plan of action for what games I need to buy as well
as rubrics and a curriculum to teach them.
Tentatively I'm hoping to have them play a few European games as well
as several abstracts to get a feel for what games can be like outside
of Monopoly and Clue and then embark on a final project of game design.
This is where I would love some suggestions because I will need to
develop a guided methodology to approach designing a game with a small
group. I'm planning on getting a large amount of pyramids and have
them design a game that will utilize the pyramids in some fashion. I
also hope to have a toy chest with glass beads, dice, chess boards,
maybe some meeples, wooden blocks, and any other odds an ends they
might be able to integrate. Then the difficulty will be designing
rubrics to actually grade all this work *laugh*. Needless to say I'm
simultaneously excited and nervous about all the work to develop the
class. Hopefully though it will go well and I can make my
plans/experiences available to everyone else online and make it easier
for someone to develop something similar down the road.
I just had to share my exciting news with some other like minded
individuals and can't talk about it much at school because the master
schedule isn't set in stone yet and I'm afraid of jinxing myself.
-Ryan
--
Ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora et invenies.
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