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"Teachers are leveraging the power of gaming to turn even reluctant student writers into enthusiastic storytellers...
When ninth graders arrived for their language arts class earlier this year, they were in for a surprise. With only a brief introduction, teacher Philip Bird and student teacher Evan Manconi invited the students into a futuristic, magical world called Cataclysm where they would spend the next several weeks in a role-playing game.
“Students took to it almost immediately,” Manconi says, using creativity and collaboration to develop characters, generate dialogue, and negotiate plot twists.
Six weeks later, the students had written some 729,500 words—nearly the equivalent of the first six books of the Harry Potter series. “They have written and written and written,” Bird says, “and all the chatter in the classroom has been focused on what their characters are doing. If writing is a muscle, I’ve gotten some incredibly muscular students out of this experience.”
Via John Evans, Andrea Jordan, Jim Lerman
Many years ago when I used games like Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail in the classroom, students were absorbed in the activity and would work beyond their investment in other activities! When learning becomes a part of you, it happens with little effort!