Grow a Game

In-class, Week 2, we discussed the value of growing a game:

Building a game is a fun brain-storming activity designed to encourage effective peer to peer communication, synthesizing ideas in a group format, and generating concepts that can further be developed through individual research.

Mary Flanagan
Game Building through “Grow A Game.”
TiltFactor.org

Group 4 Play:
Green:  repairing
Blue: cooperation
Pink: life (the game of)
Orange: urban sprawl


Board is an urban landscape/cityscape
Purpose is to create community/social settings, repair broken social structure
Encourages group dynamic

How to get two players to land in one space and work collectively?

To Win:
Moving up in the social hierarchy of community organizers.

Spaces to Land on:

Game as a similar structure to the Curriculum Reading from this week.


MS Curriculum
Building a living curriculum:
-One that deals with the issues that face us currently
-How do we deal with the world, rather than do we understand
-Teaching the students strategies in life
-How do their lives enter our lesson plans?
-Be aware of where they’re at developmentally, socially, are they social or not
-Are they getting positive affirmation at home?

Early Adolescent Concerns:
-Developmental
-Peer group interaction
-Self concept
-Complicated being in the world
(We can’t assume they don’t know what’s going on anymore.  Through social networking and vast media outlets, kids are more in touch with what’s going on than ever.)

Social concerns:
-Recognize their contexts (geographic location, family life, friends and experiences) will affect them.  Who are they going to become with these contexts?

Connecting through themes:
-They connect the understanding of the curriculum to a larger social concern
-Use skill building but does not end at skill development

Skills in a living curriculum:
-Reflecting thinking
-Critical ethics
-Values
-Self concepting and self esteeming
-Social action
-(others)

Persistent themes:
-Democracy, how do we use this concept in the classroom?  The responsibility of educators is to receive and produce knowledge and practice human dignity and related themes of freedom, equality, justice and peace. Cultural diversity is not limited to race- our skills, physical abilities, pasts, practices also comprise our C.D.

Finding themes:
-Developing curriculums with students (keep fieldwork in mind and use other theory students as resources)
-Provide opportunity for range of knowledge, use this in the objectives
-Contributions to the greater community, school as a small scale, neighborhood and world as a larger scale
-Use experiences as a teacher and expand upon them.