Janna Jackson Kellinger – författare

Up Your Teaching Game offers K-12 teachers an intuitive and refreshingly fun pathway for creating immersive, story-based games that encourage students to experience the curriculum through play. Regardless of their technical abilities, design acumen, grade level, or domain, today’s teachers have fresh opportunities to create and implement their own content-based games based on the same techniques that video game designers use to create commercial video games. In five actionable steps, this book prepares educators to design curricular games that teach instead of test, that are derived from content rather than divergent from it, and that motivate students to take ownership over their learning. Programs that most teachers are familiar with, such as PowerPoint and Google Slides, and technologies that may be new to them, such as Twine and Scratch, are addressed alongside the use of their own classrooms and schools as game spaces. Novice and veteran teachers alike, as well as curriculum designers and school technologists, will find a wealth of strategies and lessons learned, tips for avoiding pitfalls and time constraints, examples of quests and storyline advancement, and much more.

Up Your Teaching Game offers K-12 teachers an intuitive and refreshingly fun pathway for creating immersive, story-based games that encourage students to experience the curriculum through play. Regardless of their technical abilities, design acumen, grade level, or domain, today’s teachers have fresh opportunities to create and implement their own content-based games based on the same techniques that video game designers use to create commercial video games. In five actionable steps, this book prepares educators to design curricular games that teach instead of test, that are derived from content rather than divergent from it, and that motivate students to take ownership over their learning. Programs that most teachers are familiar with, such as PowerPoint and Google Slides, and technologies that may be new to them, such as Twine and Scratch, are addressed alongside the use of their own classrooms and schools as game spaces. Novice and veteran teachers alike, as well as curriculum designers and school technologists, will find a wealth of strategies and lessons learned, tips for avoiding pitfalls and time constraints, examples of quests and storyline advancement, and much more.

This book is a guide to designing curricular games to suit the needs of students. It makes connections between video games and time-tested pedagogical techniques such as discovery learning and feedback to improve student engagement and learning. It also examines the social nature of gaming such as techniques for driver/navigator partners, small groups, and whole class structures to help make thinking visible; it expands the traditional design process teachers engage in by encouraging use of video game design techniques such as playtesting. The author emphasizes designing curricular games for problem-solving and warns against designing games that are simply “Alex Trebek (host of Jeopardy) wearing a mask”. By drawing on multiple fields such as systems thinking, design theory, assessment, and curriculum design, this book relies on theory to generate techniques for practice.