Today is World Math Day. Unite with students and schools from around the world to set a new world record! This year’s challenge – to correctly answer more than 182,445,169 questions in 48 hours. Please participate and be part of the new world record.
Creating game-based learning environments or experiences using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) games is becoming an increasingly tenable, valuable, and popular instructional method. COTS games are computer or video games created for entertainment purposes. A few popular examples are SimCity, Age of Empires, ZooTycoon, and Railroad Tycoon.
My good friend Dennis Charsky invited me to co-author Integrating Commercial off-the-Shelf Video Games into School Curriculum. Ten suggestions to help educators effectively integrate COTS games are shared in this research article. Below is an overview along with a few notes from this publication.
Today is World Math Day. Unite with students and schools from around the world to set a new world record! This year’s challenge – to correctly answer more than 452,681,681 questions. Please participate and be part of the new world record.
This special event is only 1 week away. Register now and make plans to participate.
Unite with students and schools from around the world to set a new world record! The Challenge – to correctly answer more than 182,445,169 questions in 48 hours.
The students play against each other in mental arithmetic games. Students may find it captivating to play and compete in real time. Each game lasts for 60 seconds and students can play as many games as they wish. The questions are appropriately individualized to the appropriate age/grade levels. Homeschools are also welcome to participate.
(Repost from 08/21/2007)
I challenge you to complete this mini-lesson and consider the questions below.
Lesson
Watch the video below about the crisis in Darfur. (A free download of this video is avaiable here.)
Play Darfur Is Dying, a quick mini-game that simulates aspects of daily living in this region.
Discussion
Dear (Future) Teacher,
As we begin our journey into educational technology I encourage you to watch this video clip, Pay Attention, at least once and reflect upon its message. You might find it beneficial to review Karl Fisch’s Shift Happens before you watch this video.
For Discussion
What do you think are the implications for teaching and learning? For schools?
I posed the following question to the members of my personal learning network (PLN).
I received lots of good advice and suggested resources. I wanted to share the information hoping that others would find it helpful, too.
Here are the responses from my Plurk buddies…
…and these are the replies from my Twitter friends.
Please Share
I invite you to please share your ideas, teaching strategies and resources, too. You can post a text, audio or video reply in the comments to this post or you can send me a message via Plurk and Twitter.
Together we all learn more.
David Wiley says that teachers can learn a lot from online video games — the kind where players pretend to be orcs and wizards and work together in teams to slay dragons….Mr. Wiley will invite students who sign up for his spring course (which is about online teaching methods) to be an artisan, a bard, a merchant, or a monk and go on learning “quests” together.
Although he’s using a game metaphor, Mr. Wiley says that dividing students up into teams and asking them to work on group projects are time-tested teaching techniques — ones that the best video games happen to make use of. “If you reverse-engineer a popular multiplayer game, they’ve somehow encoded all these things about what good learning ought to look like,” he argues….And Mr. Wiley is inviting anyone to play along. Although only students at Brigham Young who enroll and pay for the course will get official credit, Mr. Wiley is inviting anyone else to participate informally free.
….When asked whether the playful approach might somehow dumb down the learning experience, Mr. Wiley defended the course. “I challenge you to find a meatier class in terms of the kind of skills students have to develop and the kind of project they have to pull off in the end,” he said. (Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education)
