I left out the wealth of participant contributions in my recent overviews of the first five weeks of GamesMOOC and I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect it was because there are so many great contributions, ideas and opportunities for collaboration – which I guess is one of the main strengths of the MOOC model – that I was worried that posts would just drag on and on and become unreadably long.
Nevertheless, here’s my quick scan of some of the most interesting things and ideas that I found.
Bron Stuckey notes that parent support is very helpful in bringing games into schools and that after school programs and clubs are great places to do this – showing administrators that the walls won’t tumble down.
There are 8 interesting threads about the games that educators are using in their classes – seemingly far more primary (K-6ish) schools than secondary and not huge usage in higher ed.
Rowan_Peter’s thread in the What Games do you Play? Section pointed me toward Jane McGonigal’s gamifying-real-life game SuperBetter – a “game” that I’m still tinkering with but may speak more of in the near future.
Lots of love for Minecraft and World of Warcraft in this MOOC
Christopher shared a very useful rubric for evaluating educational games produced by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State in his post which then prompted the creation of a Google Doc with some ideas about the structure of an Introduction to Games & Simulations for Instructional Designers subject.
The Games MOOC itself also provided a couple of engagement rubrics to evaluate Instructor and Student engagement in this post and subsequent comments offered some interesting additions and improvements.
The Games MOOC also sparked a lively discussion about ways to accommodate learners with different levels of gaming experience when introducing games to the classroom. (I also put in my 2 cents worth as colsim). Important to factor in the knowledge of gaming conventions and terminology and consider access and equity issues.
The 3 F’s (fun, flow and fiero) are covered in some detail with some great personal anecdotes (everything from running with Nike+ to hijacking high school computer classes) in this thread in the Quick Fire section
