How to Make Games - Part 2

In this part of the presentation I focus on some vital tips that I learned about the playtest process.  This is certainly the most important and possibly the most enjoyable part of making a game.  I playtested most of my best games with students over the years and the fun of those sessions and the lasting friendships that developed outweigh any success I have achieved as a game designer.  That might be the best lesson to share with students if you are creating games for or with your classes.

After years of working with some talented and successful game designers, I have pulled out just a few practical bits of advice that can be very insightful for testing any game.



I love the Educreations app, which was used to record this presentation.  However, I have found it's not ideal when I like 85% of what I said, then I mess up or can't remember a detail!  Consequently, here are some clarifications:

Blind playtesting - I made it sound like the playtesters at this stage have to find the game components!  I was picturing them finding them in the box like one would after purchasing a game, but it could be misleading.  Basically, this is your late stage testing and you want to provide the testers with a close copy of what they will have if they purchased a published version of your game.

That golden question about what keeps players playing comes from work I did with Kes Sampanthar when we edited the Protospiel playtest sheet.  I am in his debt for that insight.

And it slipped my mind at the moment, but it was an interview with Andrew Parks where I pulled out the idea of changing just one thing at a time in later stages of playtesting.  Take that for what it's worth.  I usually can't so limit myself!

And to elaborate on Protospiel:
The Protospiel website is here.  Check out that site, but also do some searches for it to see how the group has grown and how many published games have been created by attendees over the years.  The original idea came from Stephen Glenn and his friend Dominic Crapuchettes organized the first gathering.  It would be a shame to talk about Protospiel without giving them credit for their early efforts.

The old Protospiel site has some useful resources that didn't get moved over to the new one yet.  You might want to browse those here as well.

And last of all, I have to point out that playtesting at school has one important drawback.  Almost any game seems more fun to students when they are at school!  This is especially true if you try a game during class.  I usually did playtesting at lunch or after school, but even then games seem more fun than the usual business of that environment.  Keep that in mind when you think about dropping several thousand dollars on publishing your creation.  Games need to attract attention when in the vast array of competing products, not just when compared to your lecture on supply and demand.

More on that in the third part, if I get to it.

How to Make Games - Part 1

Here's my first attempt at a presentation about making games.  I talk very generally about how I get ideas and how I begin to develop them.  If there is interest in this, I will follow it up with information on playtesting and publishing the games.



This post also serves as an example of the Educreations app for the iPad.  I love the app, but it can be frustrating when you want to start over on the recording.  I am happy to find out that I can embed the lesson here.  Originally I thought they were only accessible by users registered with your school on the Educreations site.

Great Advice for the Creative Life

I have been reading Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon.  It's filled with some great advice for students growing up in today's information saturated society.

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When I first wrote this short post about Austin Kleon's book I had no idea how many people find my blog through it.

If you're not a teacher but you came across this blog, please consider passing the link along to someone you know in education.  Ideas can change the world and even the simplest ideas and acts can change a life.

See my pages about creativity games in the classroom or my vision for education.  If you know someone who might find them useful, please send them the links!  

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 This image has been all too true of my own work, except for that low point at the bottom.  For me it never seems like just a single point!

Creative Classroom Game - Why Did the Chicken...? and Video App Too

This post serves two purposes.  First, I wanted to highlight Why Did the Chicken...?.  It's a terribly simple, fun classroom game that lends itself to creativity.  I played it with many students over the years and we had a ton of laughs with it.  I mentioned it in my previous post as a game that came out of some work that I did with the designer, Kory Heath.

Also, this video was created with the Videolicious app for iPad.  It's a great little tool for making video reports that are 50 seconds or less.  Take some pictures or video, then record yourself talking about it.  The app takes care of the rest.  It is great fun for free.  I can see it coming in handy for quick reports for student news.

Inspiring Creativity

I love my job most when I get to inspire creativity.  One way I do this is to point students to some of my friends or acquaintances who have achieved success in fields that they are interested in.

For example,  my friend Kory Heath has designed some great games, both for the iPhone/iPad and the board and card variety.  I met up with Kory yesterday for the first time in probably four years.  I reflected on his work and realized that for almost a decade now his games have served to entertain my after school game groups and reunions with my former students.  I pass along these links below in hopes that one or more could be an inspiring launch pad for a creative, curious young gamer or programmer.

Kory is probably most well known among board game players for his game Zendo.  It is a fascinating inductive puzzle game.  He regularly gets email from teachers who use the game in class.

When it comes to fun games for iOS, these three are recommended:

• Tesla Blocks - This is a review of the most recent game he programmed.  My son has recently been hooked on it.
• Blockhouse - Here's a great twist on a sliding puzzle.  Be sure to look at the article on that page about how he built the game.  It's a good read for any aspiring game designer.
• Werewolf - This is Kory's version of the classic parlor game.  It's a great implementation that I highly recommend.

As a creative individual, Kory always leaves me with much to think about after our conversations.  Here's an interview I did with him several years ago.  It provides a glimpse into our common interests and why I enjoy the chance to work with him.

One story I love to tell about Kory was when we first made contact online.  I had just read and been amazed by his design history of Zendo, so I sent him an email.  I told him his work sounded fascinating and I suggested that he come to Protospiel, a game designer convention that I hosted in Michigan.  He was several states away and the convention was in only a couple days, so I told him he should attend the next year.  He wrote me back almost immediately to inform me he had just finished packing to leave for Protospiel in the morning.  We met that week and had an amazing time talking about possible game ideas.  One of them eventually turned into Why Did the Chicken...?.

Two Apps for Digital Storytelling

I have been working with teachers at all grade levels the past three weeks to do more digital storytelling.  Some teachers are focusing on just narrated video slideshows instead of actual stories.  Either way, having a video at the end of a project is a great way for students and teachers to show off their best work.

We don't have classroom sets of iPads in our district, but several teachers have them and others have iPhones.  So I looked for a couple very simple apps that would allow teachers and students to quickly put together stories that at least have pictures and narration.  Here are the ones I have been using.  Both are for the iPhone, but they work well on the iPad.

Story Kit - I love how this one makes the stories in book form, with separate pages.  It makes it so easy to edit the story in parts, one page at a time.  If you mess up narration you only have to do the page over that you are on.  It also allows for text and some limited drawing.  The downside is that the final stories are best viewed as books just on the device.  You can upload them to a website, but there the book displays on a single webpage with all pages of the story visible at once.

Storyrobe - This app is my preferred one because it outputs to a video in the Camera Roll.  It breaks the process of making a story into three very simple steps.  First you gather pictures and these can be from the Camera Roll or you can take them through the app.  Next you "edit", which amounts to putting the pictures in order.  Finally, record your narration.  As you record (up to three minutes) you can bring up each picture as at the appropriate time in the narration.  There are no transitions or features that allow panning or zooming.  Again, I see this as pure simplicity and I love it for the students who can get distracted by advanced options.  The only downside is there's no way to redo just a part of the audio.  One mistake during recording and you have to do it all over...or just live with the mistake.  It also doesn't seem to save multiple stories, so consider this for projects where the story will be recorded in one sitting.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Project Overview

I have written plenty about the Game Design and Ecosystems project, but I wanted to have one post that links to everything and sums up the experience.

Andrea Thelen and I agreed that we accomplished a lot with this project.  It was the first time either of us had attempted such a degree of integration.  While I had worked with Gamestar Mechanic before this, I had never taken an entire class through the design process to a multi-level game.  We were happy with the results, but we felt it took a little longer than we'd hoped to complete it.  Also, the standard of the students' work at the end was not as high or as consistent as we would have liked.  The story we hoped they'd develop was not strong, for example, and some students didn't complete all aspects of the project.

I asked Andrea to make a list of things she'd do differently next time and I added a few items of my own.  Here's what we came up with.

• Assign groups rather than have students choose their own groups
• Limit group size to two students if at all possible
• Provide feedback on each stage of the project more quickly, especially on the story elements and the extra components such as the quiz and the playtest assignment
• Start the Quest at Gamestar Mechanic right at the beginning and be sure the students are progressing in a timely manner
• Provide more examples of good and bad aspects of game design

One goal of the project was to have younger students play the games and take quizzes to see how well they learned the ecosystem facts from the games.  This did not come together as well as I had hoped.  The younger students' teachers discovered they didn't have enough time to devote to the game and the quizzes.  One classroom did play the games and the students enjoyed them a lot, but only a very few students took the quizzes.  There wasn't enough interesting data collected from those for me to report.

In summary, here are the parts of the project that I wrote about previously.  Resources related to each stage are included in the posts:

• Introduction
• Getting Started
• Planning the Games
• More requirements for the Games
• Storyboards
• Final Assignments
• Sample Games

Donations are definitely accepted!
Our ecosystem project has been a popular stop for many educators searching for project ideas.  If you find anything here useful, please consider donating $1 to $3.  Any money I receive this way will be used in my district to purchase resources for similar technology projects. We and our students greatly appreciate your support!  We would love to hear how you use the resources too.

Critical Thinking Game for the Classroom

I know this game has been referred to throughout this blog, but I wanted to centralize some of the resources  for both high tech and no-tech variations are described below.

Years ago I made a game that I used in the classroom for lessons about goals and priorities.  If used properly,  it can be an excellent starting point for critical thinking and other higher level thinking skills in any subject area with any students from about age 10 and older.  

I have played it with many students from middle school through college (here is a video I made with some former students at one campus) over the years and I have come to respect the power of the question that it raises.  Whether it is used as a game or a classroom activity, participants are simply asked the question What matters most?  By carefully choosing the items and guiding the discussion, this can be a powerful catalyst for self-evaluation and problem solving.

Using the game without technology
The game I created can be purchased as a traditional (card based) party game.  This is the version I used most in class. I would use a select subset of the cards based on the purpose of the activity. From that, I’d randomly draw five cards and have students rank the items on the cards from most important to least important.  We would usually try to guess how another person in the room would rank them.

After such an introduction, students can play the game in groups of up to 8.  It works best when students can play in pairs.

The Inexpensive Option - Right now a friend of mine is selling the old edition of the complete game (called What's It To Ya?) for less than $4.  I no longer get royalties from that edition, so this announcement is not meant to pad my wallet!  If you want to pick up a few copies (5 copies would allow up to 40 students play), check it out on this page at Fair Play Games while it’s on sale. This is a bargain, believe me.

The Newer Edition - If you want the newer version, it’s probably easiest to find it here on Amazon.  The new publisher created a version that uses a board and score sheets.  It sells for around $20.


Here's a video overview created with the Videolicious app on an iPad.




Using the game with technology

I posted several free activities on Promethean Planet based on this game.  They work easily with Promethean’s ActivExpressions for ranking, but you can run the activity with any response system or the students can rank them on paper.  A free version of ActivInspire will allow you to display these without actually using their other products, so any computer and projector will be sufficient.

Here is the original, generic activity that allows students to draw random words for the original game.

Oh Really Flipchart Activity

And the versions below are targeted toward a specific subject area with pre-selected sets of words and questions in context.  By examining these as samples it will be obvious how you can adapt them to your needs even if these don’t fit perfectly.

Government
Family and Consumer Science
Vocations and GoalsDebate
Christian/Bible Studies


The version with the most downloads so far is this "Back to School" edition. It can be used as an ice breaker in the first days of school or of a particular class:

Back to School

And finally, here is a simple Google Presentation version that you could change to use the activity in any subject.  You can put the question of what matters most into context, such as What makes a good citizen? Then list items related to that. Or you can keep it general. See the above flipchart activities for ideas. (Even if you don't want to install the free version of ActivInspire to view them you can see a preview at the site that will be useful in adapting the free Google Presentation version to your needs.)  


And if anyone is interested in the history of the game, here is a video I created a few weeks ago about my experience with bringing a game idea into reality.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Sample Games

Here are two games that came out of this project.  There were other games worth mentioning, but I am using these two because the groups did the best job of finishing all parts of the project, including the quizzes.  The plan was to give the games and quizzes to some younger students to see if they would learn the content just by playing the games.  We are still waiting on that feedback, but for now, here are the games and quizzes.

The Rainforest Journey

Click here to see the quiz for the above game.

The Producer - Felix's Journey

Click here to see the quiz for the above game.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Final Assignments

We wrapped up the game design project last week.  I will post some reflections and post a couple games in the next few days, but for now, here are two assignments the students had to complete before their project was done.

Playtest Assignment - Each group was required to have another group play their game and record feedback on this sheet.

Quiz Assignment - Younger students will play the games that were made in our class and then they will take quizzes created by our students.  This assignment just lists the requirements of those quizzes.

MACUL 2012

This week I attended both days of the MACUL conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I have a lot of notes to sift through and a ton to ponder about the leadership topics that I encountered, but I also am supposed to be finishing the district technology plan this weekend. I shouldn't even be typing this short blog post at the moment!

I will just mention these two things:

• I started the convention in Jim Peterson's session on Creating a Culture of Learning.  I decided I didn't care about tech tools.  I wanted to hear about leadership and professional development.  Jim's talk was a good start and it is worth clicking through the presentation posted at the link.
• I was looking forward to Kevin Honeycutt's keynote presentation all week.  Somehow I missed it that he was speaking two hours after that as well.  So my entire conference experience for the day was spent in his sessions.  He is inspiring and that's what I needed.  Last year when I heard him, he had some repetition from session to session, but this year each one was mostly new.  If you are unfamiliar with his work, you absolutely must check out his site.  He's doing almost everything I hope to accomplish as an educator.

Because I only listened to Kevin on Friday I missed some interesting topics, at least based on the information in the conference booklet.  I will be going through the speaker handouts posted to the site this week to catch up on those and others.

Three Free iPad Apps for Flipping the Classroom or Just Teaching

I mentioned the strengths of teaching with video in my previous post.  More than just as a tool for teachers, though, many are finding the benefits of having students create video tutorials.  Here are three free apps worth checking out if you want to explore this on an iPad.  I am including just a few thoughts on each.

ShowMe -
There's only one "slide", so to do multiple slides you have to set up the screen, record, pause, clear and set up the next screen.  If you want to undo something you say, you're out of luck for the most part.  There's no way to undo just the audio.  It has a good community for sharing the lessons though.

Educreations -
I like how you can set up you slides ahead of time for presentations in this one, but like ShowMe, there's no way to just undo the audio.  I lost a 12 slide setup twice because of this and eventually decided it's not meant to be PowerPoint.  These can be shared online, but last I checked you shared only with users who signed up in your "school" community.  I didn't see a way to share with the world at large.

Screen Chomp -
This is by TechSmith, makers of Camtasia.  That's my screen capture software of choice, so I was really looking forward to using this app.  It has a fun look that should appeal to younger students.  There's also a way to share them online and you can scroll the screen too using two fingers.  The scrolling makes up for the fact that it doesn't do multiple slides.  The drawbacks are that you can only import one picture and one again, serious audio mistakes are going to require a complete do-over of the whole presentation.  As the TechSmith site states, this is going to be good for bite-sized lessons, sort of like Jing for the iPad.

Moving Technology Out of the Classroom - Thinking about flipped instruction

I attended a workshop last week on the flipped classroom model of instruction.  The basic idea of flipped instruction is that the students get the lesson at home, usually in the form of a video, and then they work on activities or assignments in class (instead of having them as homework).

It is getting a lot of attention lately.  In fact, in the four years that I have been doing this ed-tech job this is certainly the most promising trend I have seen.  My own experience with it has been limited, but very positive.  (I just used video for instruction and I wrote about it in this project.)

I think the strength of this teaching method stems from the fact that it allows both students and teachers to put the technology to use for what it does best.  For teachers, it takes the most inhuman part of the lesson, the lecture, out of the classroom.  I found while making the video lessons that I was becoming a better communicator.  I started to enjoy making lessons again.  I could present the material exactly as I wanted to in video tutorials without being distracted by things like individual questions or classroom management issues.  ("Ryan, are you listening?" or "Girls, can that wait until after I'm done?", etc.)

And almost all evidence I have seen personally and read about indicates that the students really enjoy learning from the videos.  Every student I have spoken with expressed how helpful it was to be able to watch parts of my lessons over until they understood it.  No longer did a struggling learner have to raise a hand and stop the lesson for the entire class if he or she missed a step in my solution to a math problem.  The videos don't have to be terribly exciting, just clear.  (Case in point - the man who is probably most famous for simple video lessons)

Of course, the materials that a teacher creates or points out in a lesson do not have to be limited to video.  Beyond just recording lessons, by delivering the instruction this way at home, a teacher can provide a wide range of tools that allow students to learn in the way that is best for them.  And maybe best of all for later success, students will find that they can learn many things without the teacher being right there to bail them out.

Technology is best when it makes things fit.  The pioneers of the flipped classroom model have found that it can be used this way to better fit the needs of learners.  The results are classrooms where learning is taking place.  And more importantly than technology doing its job, teachers can now work with individual students and can more effectively develop human relationships one on one with students in the classroom.  In the end, the technology will go to the sidelines and this will prove to be the real advantage.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Storyboards

I based the storyboard portion of our project this lesson by Kevin Hodgson posted at the Gamestar Mechanic Teacher portion of the site.

My prior experience has been that students resist planning the games and that's what Mr. Hodgson stated in the lesson as well. I was pleasantly surprised to see the girls in this class enjoying the storyboarding process. As I reported previously, there were no complaints!

To start the lesson, I showed them the examples from lesson above and I gave them one example I made based specifically on the ecosystem games. I posted these directions and had them get to work:

For each level in your game, make a storyboard. Each one must include:

• The level number and title
• Whether it is a top down or platform level
• An explanation of the goal
• The types of enemies that the hero will encounter
• Where the hero starts
• Where points and the goal marker will be
• A picture that maps out the entire level

Here are some examples from our class.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Part 3

First off, thanks go to Katya Hott for posting a link to my project on the Gamestar Mechanic Teacher Blog! I am glad for the exposure and I hope some of our ideas are useful to the many teachers who will see we are doing in this all girls science class.

After reading that blog post I was reminded of some important things:

• I said I would give an update this week on our storyboard assignment. Unfortunately (sort of!) our school was closed today because of snow. It's the first time this winter, so it is a welcome surprise to have a day off...or at least a day where I'm not working at the school. The problem is I only saved the storyboard lesson and pictures on the school network. I will have to post those materials next week.
• The girls started working on their games this week. There has been a lot of excitement at this stage of the project. I was amazed at how well they worked together and were engaged in the process. It is clear that working through the Quest on the Gamestar Mechanic site does a good job of teaching them how to use the application. It was great to see so many of them begin making and playing their first games with such enthusiasm.
• Here is a copy of the Game Creation Checklist that I handed out. The girls are creating their games by referring to that checklist, their storyboards and their completed Game Flow Charts.
• Most of the students are creating their games with the basic resources they earned through the Quest, but a few are working on additional Challenges so they can get certain sprites. I did require them to do the Impact Challenge because I wanted them to have the sign sprite so they can write science facts in their games.
• Most importantly, I realized when I read Katya's post that I haven't mentioned my partner in this venture by name. Andrea Thelen is the middle school science teacher that helped create this project. I asked if I could do something with game design. She suggested the ecosystem tie-in and provided all the background information I needed to develop the project. This is the first long term project I have worked with in the science department in my district, so I have learned a lot from Andrea and I greatly appreciate her willingness to try something new.

Game Design and Ecosystems - Continuing the Project

The game design project is going still well with our group of girls. If you want to look back at my previous posts about this:

• Here's the brief introduction to the project.
• And here's the post on how we started.

We're into our third week and several groups have started their games. That means I'm very behind on posting the steps we've gone through and the documents that I used. I won't catch up entirely with this post, but here are a few more stages.

First, before or after each of the assignments below we encouraged the students to continue their progress through the Quest at Gamestar Mechanic. It has taken them a very long time to work through the five episodes necessary for them to publish games, but the girls are not complaining. Honestly, I don't think I have heard a single student complain about having to play the levels. And it appears the lessons intertwined in the game levels have been effective too. Still, I wish the Quest was a little shorter. Some groups have spent a total of three hours or more on working through the levels.

Students had a tough time filling out the Game Flow Chart (mentioned in the last post) properly, so we had to work with them to be sure they correctly planned the game and had some science facts. Here's a completed sample flow chart that I used to better explain this assignment.

Next, we required them to write an engaging introduction to their game. The assignment resource is here. I plan to send their introductions to the younger students who will be playing the games so that they can vote on the ones that sound most exciting. This is keeping with my initial project focus of effectively presenting information.

These assignments led up to storyboarding, which I will explain that stage in my next post. At this time, though, I want to mention a few other assignments that we worked on.

One of my goals, which I eventually set aside, was to have them compare and contrast the game design process (one good version of which I found explained on this page) with the Scientific Method. The main reason for this was so that the science was not lost in the fun. I liked how dreaming up a fun game is kind of like forming a hypothesis and how testing that game is like running an experiment to test a hypothesis.

I ran this by the teacher and she agreed it was a decent idea. In practice, though, it was just distracting. We started down that path by making a Glog assignment on the Scientific Method. Given the amount of time some girls are spending on the Quest, we decided to abandon that line of thinking for now.

And I also gave them a couple more journals to help them connect with concepts that they are learning in class.

• Journal 2 - Some thoughts about the science and what the students consider to be most important
• Journal 3 - Questions about games of all types and which part they would like to play in the game design process
  

Game Design and Ecosystems - Getting Started

I posted a few days ago about the project I am doing with an all girls science class at the middle school. The teacher named it G.E.M.S., after a similar course she found online. It stands for Girls Engaged in Math and Science. In the project, the girls will use Gamestar Mechanic to create computer games about energy flow in an ecosystem. The fifth grade students in the district will play the games and be assessed to see how well the games teach the concepts.

I have worked with the class for five days now and the project is going very well. Generally I have thought of the game design projects as appealing to the disengaged male students, but the girls have really been enjoying it.

Here is the flow of the project:

1) First the teacher provided a quick review of the concept of energy flow in ecosystems. Students were required to choose an ecosystem and fill out a flow chart that included producers and consumers in that ecosystem.

2) To introduce what Gamestar Mechanic games look like, I had the girls play some sample games from Kevin Hodgson's project. They had to answer a few questions about the games after trying them. The assignment is here: Sample Games Assignment

3) Next, the students had to sign up at Gamestar Mechanic in my classroom and they began the Quest. The site uses the Quest to teach the students the aspects of good game design and also how to use the tools there. I was very curious to see how the girls would take to playing through so many levels. In case they got bored or frustrated with the gaming, I tried to break up the class periods with at least one other assignment so they were not playing continually during any single hour.

It has worked very well so far. No group has completed all the levels yet, but they are not tiring of the process. Many are anxious to get started on their own games, but they need to at least complete the first Quest to be able to publish their games for others to play. (I have a Premium account at Gamestar which provides a second Quest, but most will not need to proceed into that one to get the resources they need.)

4) One assignment that I used during this time is a Game Flow Chart. It expands upon what they did with the ecosystem flow chart, but it also incorporates more facts and the game elements that they discovered in the sample games and in the Quest. That assignment is here: Game Flow Chart Assignment

The plan is to continue some planning and storyboard assignments while they work through the Quest and some necessary Challenges. (The Challenges provide optional levels that allow students to earn additional sprites. Some of those will be necessary for an engaging, educational game.)

One other assignment we used was a journal warm-up assignment. I point this out because it is based on some of James Paul Gee's learning principles from What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. I loved the book and this journal assignment was my first attempt to see if the principles are effective with these girls. I wanted them to consider themselves within the roles of scientist, game designer and teacher.

Journal Assignment 1

Classroom Game Lesson - Critical Thinking and Writing

I dug up a lesson this week that I used to use in my Pre-Calculus classes. The seniors would graduate a few weeks before school was out, so for those remaining juniors I would set them loose on this very popular lesson where I attempted to teach critical thinking using a variety of board and card games. It would last about five class periods.

Here's a PDF of the last version of this assignment that I used. (It was about this time that I left the math classroom to work as the Instructional Technology Coordinator.)

While the students loved these days and we all had fun, I worked each year to improve the focus so that they were objectively thinking about the games and what they were doing. You'll note in the handout above that I continually emphasize thinking, clear communication and analysis of what was going on in the game. I have to admit, though, that I never got very far in that endeavor. Even with the excellent students that ended up in that class, the fun got most of the attention.

This served to alert me to the importance of setting game lessons in context. Now when I introduce a game design lesson (usually involving computer games) I start by downplaying the games and emphasizing the knowledge and skills that we want the students to leave with.

Here are the games that I used in this lesson, with links to their pages on the Boardgame Geek. I'm sure a lot of other games that would be perfect for this lesson have come out since 2008 when I last assigned it, but reading up on these pages will certainly draw your attention to additional options. (Some titles have different names at BGG than the editions I used on the worksheet. They are essentially the same games.)

Deduction

Coda
Clue Card Game
Top Secret Spies

What's That On My Head?

Strategy
Hey! That's My Fish!
Loco
Ingenious
Durch die Wuste (Through the Desert)

Probability
Fill or Bust
Double or Nothing
No Thanks
Last Chance

Party/Social Games
What's It To Ya? (Oh, Really!)
Thingamajig
What Were You Thinking?
Balderdash

Passion for learning

This must be the best time in the history of the world for people who love to learn. So much knowledge is immediately accessible. Video tutorials allow novices to pick up skills from masters.

I read David Warlick's blog post last week that compares the state of education in Finland with the system in the U.S.. It is here and it's worth the read.

His points are valid, but like so many other opinions on this matter, I think it only touches on the heart of the issue. I am face to face with the real problem every hour that I'm in the classroom, yet I rarely read anything that points it out clearly. From what I see daily, the core of the problem is simply that in the U.S., students do not value learning on an emotional level. For the most part, especially starting at about 6th grade, there is no passion to learn.

Instead, we manage to turn the whole thing into into a system for getting credit. A focus on learning turns to a focus on grades. At the secondary level, grades give way to credit. This credit supposedly will turn into something meaningful way down the road, like getting into a good college or getting a good job. Over the years, students completely forget the joy of learning.

So in this time where learning is more obtainable than ever before, let's remember the only real job is to help our students discover the joy of learning. Let's hunt out and destroy those practices that slowly squelch their natural curiosity and passion to discover. Maybe then the other problems that get attention inside and outside of the schools would take care of themselves.

Free Game Giveaway

As mentioned last week, I put an edition of my card game King for a Day up for sale on The Game Crafter. It was previously only available in a cheap black & white edition or as a print-and-play game. With only a few copies out there, it still got some good comments and a review on its page at the Boardgame Geek. I finally decided this year to make a nice color edition with the help of my daughter.

To draw more attention to the project, I'm giving away a free copy. See the details below to enter to win.

The game would be useful in the middle or high school classroom as it requires good communication skills from start to finish. Strategy, negotiation and careful management of resources are also required to play well. After years of playtesting the game with students, I know it goes over well with teens.

I am also featuring the game here to promote The Game Crafter site because I think it can be used for some excellent classroom projects. With some additional time spent on graphics, students can produce very nice copies of their game through the site.

So how can you win? There are three ways to enter and if you enter in multiple ways you get entered multiple times. On February 12, 2012 I will randomly draw one entry from all submitted.

• If you have a Facebook account, Like the King for a Day Card Game page on Facebook.
• If you have a Boardgame Geek account, be a fan of the game on its page. (Don't just "Like" it there because I won't know who did it. Click the Become a Fan link in the upper right of the page.)
• If you want to be notified about what I'm doing or discovering in classroom technology and games, follow this blog by clicking the Join this site button at the right.

If you have already done any of those things, you're already entered even if you don't know it!

I will contact the winner after I randomly select an entry. Once I get a mailing address, I will

order a copy of the game and have it shipped to the address. (Please understand, however, that am restricting the giveaway to continental U.S. addresses only.) This drawing is not affiliated with any sites mentioned above.