[Edu] Class development

[Magi D. Shepley]

This is fantastic, Ryan!  Both I and the other technology education 
teacher (my first year there were two of us) at the private school I 
left did major units on game design.  In my case, it was a way of 
working on critical thinking skills (your idea, as well, I see!), 
problem solving skills and social skills.  Students worked in groups to 
modify an existing game or to create their own game.  I allowed them to 
modify existing games because of the population I was working with... I 
was at a private school for children with special needs, and within the 
school, had the groups (mostly boys!) with the most severe emotional and 
behavioral disabilities.  These kids didn't leave their classrooms, so I 
taught Tech Ed on a cart!  That was tons of fun when we had the blizzard 
in February and then all the rain we had that spring, because half of my 
kids were in a totally separate building!  In any case, the other 
teacher had obtained a reusable kit for designing a board game, but I'm 
afraid I don't remember the name of the kit.  The projects were 
interesting to most of the kids, but they infinitely preferred PLAYING 
the games I brought in (Fluxx, Mille Bournes, Pit, Uno, Mastermind, 
Sett, Rack-O, Life, and MouseTrap) to creating their own. 

Magi

miyu wrote:
> Nothing is set in stone yet so no quoting me on the main page of the 
> site :p 
>
> This morning I heard second hand that when working on the master 
> schedule for the year after next when my school changes from a Junior 
> High (grades 7-9) to a Middle School (grades 6-8) that I have a good 
> probability of having a 9 weeks class on developing critical thinking 
> skills.  The course will be based on developing critical thinking 
> skills through board games.  This means that I will have this summer 
> to draw up a good plan of action for what games I need to buy as well 
> as rubrics and a curriculum to teach them.
>
> Tentatively I'm hoping to have them play a few European games as well 
> as several abstracts to get a feel for what games can be like outside 
> of Monopoly and Clue and then embark on a final project of game design. 
>
> This is where I would love some suggestions because I will need to 
> develop a guided methodology to approach designing a game with a small 
> group.  I'm planning on getting a large amount of pyramids and have 
> them design a game that will utilize the pyramids in some fashion.  I 
> also hope to have a toy chest with glass beads, dice, chess boards, 
> maybe some meeples, wooden blocks, and any other odds an ends they 
> might be able to integrate.  Then the difficulty will be designing 
> rubrics to actually grade all this work *laugh*.  Needless to say I'm 
> simultaneously excited and nervous about all the work to develop the 
> class.  Hopefully though it will go well and I can make my 
> plans/experiences available to everyone else online and make it easier 
> for someone to develop something similar down the road.
>
> I just had to share my exciting news with some other like minded 
> individuals and can't talk about it much at school because the master 
> schedule isn't set in stone yet and I'm afraid of jinxing myself.
>
>                                  -Ryan
>
> -- 
> Ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora et invenies.
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