Category Archives: Games and Learning

Attending SXSW Interactive is a little like being on safari. The day begins with anticipation, involves endless strategizing around where to be and what ballrooms offer the maximum return, and ends with a re-cap of which “big game” was spotted, what life-changing experiences were narrowly missed and what was photo (or Tweet, or Instagram, or Meerkat) worthy. The highs and lows are all there—some great speakers sharing the new and unexpected, some sessions so popular they require sacrificing your morning…

On March 23, Michael Levine presented “Teaching with Digital Games,” a webinar for the Share My Lesson Virtual Conference with Rebecca Rufo-Tepper from the Institute of Play. The session was attended live by nearly 500 participants, and is now available for view on demand on the Share My Lesson website until March 22, 2016. Participants who take the webinar are eligible to receive one hour of professional development credit. Register online to view the session.

This post was originally published on gamesandlearning.org. Whether developing formal learning games aimed for the classroom or apps you want parents to purchase for their kids, the role of research in game development and assessment of learning is one of the most critical decisions developers must make. A discussion at this week’s SXSW Interactive encouraged developers to consider the way they use product research and how best to guard against the pitfalls of group-think. For game giant LEGO research counters…

How can games unlock a rich world of learning? That is the key question behind a new resource that aims to help teachers successfully incorporate games in the classroom. The MindShift Guide to Digital Games and Learning is the culmination of a series of blog posts authored by Forbes contributor and professor Jordan Shapiro, and tackles many of the most pressing questions that teachers and parents have about using digital games for learning. Featuring a foreword by Katie Salen, the…

I spent last weekend on a camping trip with extended family.  Having just completed a report on the use of digital games in the classroom, I was more than a little eager to consult with the kids in the group about their use of digital games inside and outside of the classroom.  Given the popularity of Minecraft, I started there.  “Do any of you guys play Minecraft?” I asked.  Instantly there were three kids with three devices surrounding me, each…

Part #20 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning Series Even for educators who are excited about using games in the classroom, questions inevitably come up around the very real obstacles to implementation, and strategies for overcoming them. A recent survey from the Games and Learning Publishing Council asked 700 teachers to identify and rank the major barriers to using games in the classroom. Here are the top 10 obstacles they list and ideas about how to overcome each one. 1.…

Part 19 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning By now, you’ve probably read enough to be convinced that it’s worth trying games in your classroom. You understand that games are not meant to be robot teachers, replacing the human-to-human relationship. Games are a tool that teachers can use to do their jobs more effectively and more efficiently. Games provide a different approach to developing metacognitive skills through persistent self-reflection and iteration of particular skill sets. Games offer experiential contextualized…

Part 18 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning To make sense of the broad and complex world of games and learning, we’re inclined to create neatly organized lists and categories. The truth is that there are so many different kinds of learning games, it’s difficult to break them down into clear-cut categories. Especially in an atmosphere of ed-tech entrepreneurship that aims to disrupt our habitual way of thinking about education, familiar classification structures can sometimes hold us back more…

Part 17 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning Many teachers are excited about trying games in the classroom but don’t know where to begin. The landscape of learning games is vast and confusing — and it’s growing and changing rapidly. Moving at the pace of the software industry, games are often updated and iterated so that new versions replace familiar ones before you’ve even had a chance to implement them in your classroom routine. And teachers have busy schedules.…

Part 16 of MindShift’s Guide to Games and Learning The textbook is a problem that consistently plagues classrooms. At best, textbooks are innocuous, offering simple summaries of a very broad subject area. At worst, they oversimplify things, providing less information than an encyclopedia article without enough nuance or context to make it meaningful. One study showed that when students read textbooks, they tend to retain “absurd” details, but fail to “grasp the main point.” Susan M. Hubbuch writes, “The trouble…