Gaming the Past

I finally get to share this and I am so excited! Next year I will be co-leading a Ninth Grade Design Lab for all incoming 9s at Cincinnati Country Day School! Here’s the nutshell. All of our ninth graders will collaborate in small groups to research and design a boardgame on a contemporary modern world issue/problem (different issues for different groups and tbd).

The boardgame will be designed using the Historical / Agential Problem Space Framework for game design that I have written about for years and will share even more widely in the upcoming Designing Historical Games for Classrooms Designing Historical Games for Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Educa. As the groups learn essential skills for research, collaboration, and game design, they will also develop Makerspace skills under the expert guidance of co-leader Jamie Back and develop their skills at presentation. Note the focus on skills: this Design Lab is about the process, about developing future durable (as I think is the “in” term) skills that will serve the kids in life, high school, and college.

When they have finished designing and engineering the board game, they will give a presentation on the real world topic and their game-based analysis to our 6th graders and have them play the games and provide critical feedback, an empowering moment for 6th and a great vertical connection to make between our Upper and Middle Schools!

I am so very grateful to get to put into practice my agential game design pedagogies, that I have used in my own classes here for years, to an entire school program that I think will be truly a transformative educational moment for our 9ths. Let me know if I can gush some more on details 🙂