Educators Gaming this Week at East
Our Thoughts
Our pre-thinking:
Here’s what we listened to, read, and watched in preparation for our gaming experiment:
Educators Share How Video Games Can Help Kids Build SEL Skills
“…educators shouldn’t ignore video games if they want students to be media-literate, because they are the “storytelling medium of the 21st century.”
Gaming Can Make a Better World
“Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.”
Radiolab on the game
“Ryan and Amy Green were facing the unfaceable: their youngest son, Joel was diagnosed with terminal cancer after his first birthday. Producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni tells the story of how Ryan and Amy stumble onto an unlikely way of processing their experience fighting alongside Joel: they decide to turn it into a video game. In the end, they find themselves facing what might be, for a game designer or a parent, the hardest design problem ever.”
A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever
“That Dragon, Cancer is an amazing work of art,” says prominent game theorist Raph Koster. “In some ways, I’m glad that games were there for Ryan, because it sounds to me like the kind of questions that he is wrestling with, games are the right medium to wrestle with them in.”