Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
To do this, I restructured a unit within my AMH 2010 course so that students
would
for the
students to choose from, based around five thematic fields of study (war,
government, culture, economics, and diplomacy) from the History field. Then I
built various gaming techniques into the overall course, including the use of
gaming vocabulary, grades presented as experience points (XP), formative assess-
ments based around the character
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play the level
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to complete the unit. I created five
“
characters
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s field of expertise, and a summative assessment
that utilized teamwork requiring all five characters to
'
“
defeat the boss challenge.
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During the early part of the course, students were introduced to the five character
classes. After a few weeks, they were allowed to choose their character by lottery
in an attempt to gain equal guild sizes. (A
guild
in my parlance was all players of
one character type.) By having equal guild sizes, I hoped to be able to build
“
supergroups
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for other assessments, particularly the main unit assessment.
In all of my classes, I used a variety of classroom assessment techniques (CATs)
built around student preparation. I gave students instructions about the class
before our upcoming topic focus. Traditionally, this has been general in nature; for
this class, I provided more development around each of the character classes. This
idea of
(what I called the daily quest for the game) was a key
piece of evidence in how I determined engagement within the class. Each semester
I recorded whether or not the student was prepared for a given day or not, and
then incorporated that overall measure as 10% of their overall grade. It has been
my casual observation that those students who were better prepared more often
did better overall in the class. Some did not, of course, though it was impossible to
tell exactly what would have happened for said students had they never prepared.
And, equally, some students who
“
class preparation
�
the daily prep, still managed to do
well in the overall grade of the course, although that percentage was low.
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blew off
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Within the class, each day had a variety of CATs that I used to cover the material.
In many courses, this was not effective because a majority of students were
not
prepared, thus not engaged in the class that day. For this course, as stated, I built
the CATs to merge with the classes. Each day would see either a
�
meeting or a guild meeting. Toward the end of the semester, there were more
guild meetings, primarily because of changes to the overall makeup of the class.
“
super group
For the gaming unit, I then built a special assessment that forced a supergroup to
work together, just like in a game where typically you needed most of the character
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