All posts by Maura A. Smale

Maura Smale is Chief Librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Reading/Writing Games

Unscrambling Your Body Paragraph

Created by Joe Bisz

Description
This exercise is a fun way to teach students sentence organization in a paragraph, particularly understanding the natural order that transition words provide. Once you understand what I’ve done, you can just create your own paragraphs, of course—but be aware that students may find perfectly logical ways to order the paragraph beyond what you predicted! To teach this exercise in its ideal form so that its initial focus is on procedural thinking, combine it with a map-like game (Tic-tac-toe, a maze, war game map, etc.) as a preface (see example elsewhere or chat with Joe).

Note: This is part of my “Following a Space” series of exercises.

Unscrambling Your Body Paragraph-Web

Announcements

Game Meetup: Wed June 1

Dear colleagues,

I hope you will join us for all or part of an end-of-semester game date hosted by members of the CUNY Games Network at BMCC. We will have a selection of excellent games to play. We will also have informal conversations about the pedagogical uses of games as we play. We hope to make this an end-of-semester tradition, so please come help kick it off! Besides, we know that everyone can use a little game time to blow off steam after the stress of exams and turning in grades.

Here are the details:

What: Game Meet-up
When: Wednesday, June 1, 11-5pm
Where: BMCC Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship (Rm. S501B)

(Directions to BMCC)

We will have a lunch break during the meet-up to get some local fare (either in-house or from the yummy venders off campus).

If you have a favorite game, please bring it with you. Looking forward to seeing you all on the 1st!

Best Regards,
The CUNY Games Network Steering Committee

Photo credit: Miranda Richards

Announcements

Welcome to the CUNY Games Network!


What can you do here?

Our website includes a collection of resources on using games in teaching and learning, as well as examples of pedagogical games. Visit the Using Games section to find games you can use in your classroom. Interested in research or publishing your own scholarly work? Head to Publish Your Research to find out about scholarly journals that publish on games-based learning.

What’s coming next?

Here are some features we’re planning for the future:

  • More guidelines for using games in your teaching, including choosing the right lesson for your game and choosing the right game mechanic for your lesson
  • Search for games by discipline, subject, or game mechanic
  • And (of course), more games!

If you have suggestions or comments, we’d love to hear from you: cunygamesadmin@googlegroups.com.