From playing games, to teaching with games, making your own games, and even gamifying your email -- the ProfHacker archives have a lot to offer when thinking about games.
Games in the Classroom
Anastasia has written a very thorough series of posts on Games in the Classroom:
- Part 1 explains that games can help students through exploring content through new or multiple points of view, learning through making, and collaboration.
- Part 2 explains how and where to discover games that you might want to use in the classroom
- Part 3 introduces tools and concepts for making games in the classroom
- Part 4 discusses multiplayer games as models for education
Make Your Own Games
If you want to make your own games, or teach your students to do so, here are some apps and resources Anastasia’s reviewed:
Other Aspects of Teaching and Learning with Games
Jason’s Playing to Learn reminds us of the developmental value of play as learning for young children and opens up ways of thinking about play for adults.
Essential reading if you’re thinking about teaching game history or beginning to use games in your classroom is Anastasia’s post on Games in the Library, which explores some of the practical and institutional issues about archiving games and resources for such research.
Adeline described her experience at Reacting to the Past, an educational institute based on historical role-playing games.
Anastasia also summarized discussions and resources from the 2012 THATCamp Games in Returning to Play at THATCamp.
Gamification
Guest author Jesse Stommel explained how he made getting closer to Inbox Zero more fun in How to Crowdsource and Gamify Your Email
In Gamifying Homework, Jason described one educator’s experiment in rewarding students with vitual badges for taking quizzes that would promote their learning.
Anastasia explained how she has experimented with gamification in one class in How to ‘Gamify’ Your Class Website to encourage student participation.
Games ProfHackers Like
It’s not all work and no play -- we’ve also written quite a few posts and recommendations about games we like:
- Brian wrote about the card-based iOS game Ascension
- Mark explained how you can combine game-playing and your daily run with Zombies, Run!
- Ryan explained why he likes the gaming platform Steam
- Ryan recommends the board game Small World
- In 2013’s Gift Guide, Brian recommended several board games that take only 10 minutes to play: Escape: the Curse of the Temple, Love Letter, and Space Alert. (Our previous gift guides also contain a number of game suggestions: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009.)
(Creative Commons licensed image from Flickr user ashish joy)
