Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
As a whole, the structure of the curriculum has not changed, but rather what has
changed is the vocabulary and context. With a little imagination and energy,
changing a classroom into an RPG of any setting or time frame is as easy as
renaming pencils to swords, math problems into monsters, squares into plots of
land, and perimeters into fences around your land. This has been a very effective
method to engage our students and to teach them in a manner that they will
both enjoy and remember.
Why We Wanted to Turn
Our Classroom into an RPG
Turning our classroom into an RPG started after a discussion on what the
motivations of our seventh grade students were. Having seen students time and
time again playing simple flash games, hearing conversations about what new
games were coming out, seeing students play card games on campus, and even
creating their own games with
“
Silly Bands,
�
it seemed obvious what the driving
force behind our students
interests were. But what was it that kept them coming
back? After doing some research and watching a few TEDtalks, one which
mentioned Lee Sheldon
'
s class, and others that mentioned the power of gaming
to engage and promote learning, we decided to come up with a game model that
would work for our classroom.
'
Being mild gamers ourselves and having some basic information on the
psychology of gaming and other game theories, the one aspect of our game
that we knew we needed to have was the experience bar. The experience bar,
which fills until leveling up and then reverts back to empty, fulfills our motivating
factor for a number of reasons. The tasks that fill the bar would be attainable and,
therefore, would not discourage some students. The bar would be constantly
growing, encouraging the students to continue their work in order to level up.
Once the bar was filled, they had the achievement of leveling up, but now were
left with an empty XP bar, which they once again wanted to fill up. We have
experienced this ourselves with games, such as
We Rule
and
World of Warcraft.
Our efforts to find an experience bar that was easily programmable came up empty.
However, with the help of our school administrators, we figured out a relatively
simple method of creating an experience bar, using Google sites and gadgets.
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