Learning Through Gaming - One of our first assignments

I'm helping with a dream class at our middle school this marking period. It's called Learning Through Gaming. I'm showing the students a mix of digital and non-digital games and we are learning these skills:

• Communication
• Math
• Problem Solving/Thinking
• Success

I'm really excited about that last one. The idea is we can win in life using principles that help us win in games. For example, we have to know the objective, play by the rules, play to win and play so others can do their best.

I told the students from the start that they'd have to play, then do some written reflections. Here's one of our first assignments. In it, students had to 

• Play three games that I programmed. I made them a number of years ago using Stencyl and I've written about them previously on this blog. You can see all four of my Stencyl games on this page. It's probably best to play the games on Chromebooks or laptops.
• Answer questions about each one, including opinion questions about which they liked best and why.

The students had a lot of fun with the games. I'm glad to see they held up well. They didn't do such a great job on answering the questions. I quickly gave them feedback, asking many of them to try again. It was a good exercise to convince them I want to see meaningful reflection.

Click here to get the assignment document as a Google Doc. Feel free to make a copy and edit or share it as you like. I appreciate it if your copy keeps a link back to my blog.

If you're interested, see these blog posts about other ways to use two of those games:

• A critical thinking and writing activity based on What's It to Ya?
• A game based learning activity for Pegged