Written by 
At the end of March, four Gr.7 UTS History classes play-tested the serious games “Death in Sakkara” and “Flight to Freedom”. Simultaneously they also completed corresponding student activities that I had created for each game. I had a chance to sit in on the classes to see how things went, and History teachers Zach Fanni and Vince Dannetta also created simple one-page surveys about each game.
I haven’t had a chance to look at the surveys in-depth, but at first blush and based on my observations and conversations with the students and Zach and Vince, both games and the student activities worked very well. The level of interest and engagement was very high – as I walked around throughout the classes not a single student was on another website (no frantic attempts at minimizing off-topic websites!). I will be giving a more detailed overview of the experiment during my Action Plan presentation.
The game URLs and updated student activities can be found at: http://www.changegamer.ca/history.html
Here is a game to pass along to your science teachers – http://www.enercities.eu/
Hi Justin,
thanks for this. I have used Enercities with my Gr.9 Geo classes and it has worked very well. Now that I have had some success working with some of our History teachers through the Cohort 21 Action Plan, I want to further branch out to our Science department. I’m going to suggest Enercities in addition to some other Energy/Climate Change related games (http://www.changegamer.ca/energy–climate-change.html). My wife, who teaches Science in the TDSB, has used a couple of these games and activities and found them to be very effective (they line up well with the Gr.9 expectations in the Electricity unit and the Gr.10 expectations in the Climate Change unit).
Take care and thanks again.
Mike
Such a cool action plan. I love reading your posts and sharing your resources to my other teachers.
I’ve really enjoyed following you through on this journey and experimenting with some fun (and serious) games with my grade 7 social studies class next year!
Question about these games: are they mainly focused on content mastery or skill development (such as critical thinking, for example) or both? Is there a collection of games that target different areas or have you noticed that most games lean to one or another?
Hi Celeste,
great questions. I think most of the games on the ChangeGamer.ca website focus on content mastery AND skill development (leaning more to the skill development side). A game like ‘Death in Sakkara’ clearly focuses more on content mastery, while ‘Flight to Freedom’ focuses on both content and skill. If you want to see an example of a teacher taking game-based learning to a whole new level, check out RSGC teacher Paul Darvasi’s website (http://www.ludiclearning.org/). This guy is doing unbelievable work.
Take care and thanks for all of your support and encouragement this year!
Mike