Game design toolkit

This link to the Institue of Play's Game Design Toolkit is a must read for anyone who's interested in designing games for their classroom:
http://www.instituteofplay.org/FDFBCBA2-4BAE-4F83-A267-B159AD44D439/FinalDownload/DownloadId-84F185B4F10451B38369C46FAA14CB28/FDFBCBA2-4BAE-4F83-A267-B159AD44D439/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/IOP_QDesignPack_GamesandLearning_1.0.pdf

The first thing they say to consider are the parts of a game:

• goal: what's the end point of the game?
• challenge: contrary to popular opinion, kids like challenges.
• core mechanics: what the player has to do during the game (kick a ball, move a piece on a board etc)
• components: materials such as pen and paper or a ball
• rules: the main difference between free play and a game is the presence of rules.  If you watch kids play, half the time seems to be spent in arguing about the rules...which proves that kids love rules, especially if they have a hand in making them
• space: is this a classroom game or a playground game? etc.

One of the ideas they suggest is to take a well-known game, or a game you know well and to modify it to achieve the learning aims you want.  In yesterday's post I mentioned that I modified Dance-Dance-Revolution into a game of listening and recognising words.   Interestingly, whenever I've asked my students to invent games to practice grammar or vocabulary, very often, that's exactly what they've done, to the point of sometimes even taking a store-bought game board for Monopoly or another game and taping their own cards over the squares.  In this document they show you step by step how they made a Clue-type game to teach the metric system.

The rest of the document walks you through the process of game design and even offers templates to work from, including one for a questionnaire you can give the students after they playtest it.

The school Quest to Learn was designed entirely on the concept of game-based learning.  If they can build a whole school around this concept (while comforming to the core curriculum!) then the least we can do is make it a rule to have at least one "fun" learning activity every so often.