Yesterday, I shared out a game that I made in Gamestar Mechanic for some friends who are part of a book study group toggling between online and offline meeting. I am online only. In the book, Teaching Naked, the author (Jose Bowen) goes into detail about how gamification might change the way students in a college classroom interacts with material and enhance learning.
Note: I am not convinced on all of the merits of gamifying our classroom but I am intrigued by game design as a learning possibility, and teach an entire unit to my sixth graders on game design. I even did a K12 Online Conference keynote about it.
Some of us in the book group called #Tomereaders were talking about games and wondering how we might create a game for the book study group. That might still happen. I saw some sketches of game levels from Matthew Cook. He was making a point about engagement and design, I think, but I decided to take his levels literally and design a video game with his sketches as my template.
His design:
Gaming must be progressively more difficult #Tomereaders pic.twitter.com/eslhaLkoxy
— Matthew Cook (@Cyclobrarian) June 17, 2015
My interpretation:
I decided to keep things simple, with limited enemies and treasure, and more of a discovery game of content related to the book we are reading. You can play the game, too.
Peace (in the mix),
Kevin