Teaching. Teaching about teaching. Teaching about teaching with technology. Games as tools to examine all of the above.
On Monday, October 22, 2018, Anthropology professor Krista Harper and I hosted a gathering of University of Massachusetts Amherst instructors: Game-Based Learning Community of Practice: Make a Game for your Class. The session was built on the premise that games emerging out of the loose heritage of the popular card game Apples to Apples (we chose to label …
Continue reading ““Judge & Justify” Games for the University Classroom”
I (virtually) visited a Political Ecology and Environmental Justice graduate class in Budapest to help them with their game design projects a few weeks back. I thought it was a great session, and I hope the students got useful feedback from me and my co-panelists. My full write-up and recording of the visit are on my …
Teaching Anthropology of/Through Games collects UMass Amherst professor Krista Harper’s reports on developing and teaching a class in Fall 2014 on anthropology, games, and how the two interact. I helped Krista develop the game design activities for her students, focused on having students explore models from seminal anthropology journal articles with game structures. The students did …
Continue reading “Teaching Anthropology of/Through Games at UMass Amherst”
“Dog Eat Dog should be taught in schools.”
The articles linked and abstracted below are both have many significant implications for using games and game-like designs for learning, but the key takeaway is that we can’t just say certain implementations of gameful learning work because they look and feel “right.” I’m so glad to see more assessment start rolling out, so we have …
Continue reading “Two recent studies on games and gamification in undergraduate classrooms.”
From Karl Kapp’s post: Abstracts of Three Meta-Analysis Studies of Serious Games: Serious games were found to be more effective in terms of learning and retention than conventional instruction methods. Mixed results concerning if learning games are more motivating or not than traditional instruction. Games should be supplemented with other instruction methods. Games should be played …
