Double Entry Jornal #10

"We must imagine and create new educational strategies and technologies,share them with one another, and interactively refine and extend them."

In Tygarts Valley Middle and High School in Mill Creek, WV students participate in Globaloria curriculum; a social networking and video game design developing.   For the students their computer lab has turned into a mini-software company.  They have spent the entire course working individually or with partners developing a game that teaches an educatinal concept of their choosing, there's critical thinking needed to understand and communicate to players what exactly is toughest

http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2012/06/13/03games.h05.html



In one row, juniors Jacob Currence and Tyler Gum test the gun-shooting level of "Finding Mr. X," a film noir-flavored game they've created to test players' acumen in quadratic equations. Behind them, Kasey Meadows demonstrates how the protagonist in "The Lost Llama" weaves through a maze and solves riddles about mathematical sines, cosines, and tangents.
The incessant low din suggests chaos, but White insists it's the sound of productivity.
"It's just a different type of classroom," she says.
White is the pioneer here at Tygarts Valley Middle and High School in Mill Creek, W.Va., where for one period a day for the past two years she has taught the Globaloria curriculum, a creation of the New York City-based ed-tech nonprofit World Wide Workshop built around students participating in social networking and video game design. It's an effort to transform much more than the classroom vibe.
For the students in this computer-lab-turned-mini-software-company, who spend the entire course working individually or with partners developing a game that teaches an educational concept of their choosing, there's the critical thinking needed to understand and communicate to players what exactly is toughest to teach about a subject. There are also the transferable skills of proposal writing, storyboarding, AdobeScript software coding, informational blogging, and presentation of progress reports, as students follow a development plan similar to those in the commercial gaming industry through tools available through their account on Globaloria's wiki site.