Games+Learning+Society 10 Conference

The Power of Context over Content
Todd Wakeman, AJ Webster

The demands of the 21st Century require a different approach from traditional education.  In the current paradigm, content is king.  Educators and parents are often concerned with coverage of specific topics and attempt to measure the understanding of algorithms and the recall of facts. Rather than force-feeding everyone the same content, we should be creating contexts in which students have opportunities to think, practice skills, take risks, and explore. This workshop which will be a combination of presentation, play and discussion, will target how and why we need to shift our focus from delivering content to creating contexts.  We will offer practical advice on implementing this approach in the face of standards-driven school culture.

It’s Alive! Building a Playful Unit Plan Around a STEM Game
Ellen Jameson, Justin Trewartha, Marshall Behringer

Whether you want to build a game into a set of lessons, or create a set of lessons around a game, you have a lot of decisions to make in order for your lessons to live and breathe. In this session designed for upper elementary and secondary teachers, we will join forces and lesson plans to create an über-playful game-based curriculum unit from the ground up! In the process, we’ll collectively, address common considerations in lesson planning for games such as time constraints, gameplay session design, developing activities to extend learning outside of the game, infrastructure and access issues, and evaluation and outcomes. Each of the components we make during this session could become a part of your next game-based unit plan.