The Game-Based Learning Blog

The Game-Based Learning Blog first required students to play a learning game (preferably digital). The students then post their results to the blog. With this blog, the students are also given an opportunity to address a number of questions related to the game's subject matter. 

A great example of a Game-Based Learning Blog is a blog that my US Government students produced last year. This blog is entitled The iCivics Blog.

Click here to view The iCivics Blog.

The iCivics Blog, as the name suggests, first required students to play one or more of the iCivics computer games. The game of choice - Win the White House. 

Click here to view the game Win the White House.

After playing the game, the students posted their scores to The iCivics Blog. They then answered a number of questions related to the presidential election process.

Side Note:
When first introducing the iCivics games to my students, I share with them the iCivics website.

Click here to view the iCivics website.

There, iCivics lists, every three months, a handful of community service projects from Ashoka Youth Ventures. I have the students read the two-or-three sentence describing each of these projects and then I have the student play from their desks one of the games. Then when they are done, I tell them that they can donate the points that they have earned to the projects they like and that ICivics will donate $1,000 to the projects that receive the most amount of points. Of course, I expect them to indicate on the iCivivs blog which community service project they donated their points to and the reasons why.

Another Side Note:
Whatever you may think of game-based learning or instructional technology in general, I’d like you to take a second to think about the rapid speed at which digital technology is developing and the fact that the person who founded iCivics, Sandra Day o'Connor, is the first female to serve on the United States Supreme Court. 

In other words, given the fact that iCivics is headed by one of this country's truly great pioneers and that her iCivics exists today in an age of rapid technological develop, I want you to imagine the high-quality computer games that iCivics will most certainly bring to the educational forefront in the very near future.

We are but only at the beginning of the golden age of educational video games.

So give the games a go now or give them a later, but at some point, sooner than later probably, you will give them a go and, if not, certainly your students will. 

As a wise colleague once told me, “There's much value there.”

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