Last Friday, after missing many of their gatherings, I was finally able to attend "Final Fridays: A Monthly Gathering of CUNY Faculty and Staff Interested in Game-Based Interactive Pedagogy". If it sounds interesting and you work for CUNY, you can join the Games Network group through the CUNY Commons: http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/games-teaching-and-learning/home/.
Joe Bisz of BMCC led a workshop on developing games for use in the classroom. He started us off with a deck of cards based on work by Mary Flanagan, the artist, scholar, programmer, designer and educator (formerly at Hunter and now at Dartmouth) who, among her many accomplishments, developed the first computer game for girls.
From Joe's cards each group chose three categories (game, action, and lesson) then used the "random" selections to brainstorm the beginnings of a game for learning. For instance our groups' three cards were: Finding Sources [Lesson], Walking [Action], and Checkers [Game].
Like any good game-related event, this one was interactive, so we spent most of the time trying to figure out how to build a game with the elements we'd picked. Then each of the three groups presented to the others. There was a lot of interesting thinking around the room, and we decided to explore one of the ideas further at the next session.
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