Speaking of badges, good news folks: the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning is a Stage 1 winner in the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Teacher Mastery badge competition (whew, that was a mouthful). Our proposal is to develop a badge system for an online professional development community in which teacher-learners develop their skills as history educators, instructional designers and peer collaborators. We are working with game developers and education researchers on the Stage 2 proposal which describes the functionality of the badges in more detail. And, if all goes very well, we’ll be heading to San Francisco at the end of February to pitch the project in front of a live panel of judges. Whatever happens, we are learning the ins and outs of badging as a way to motivate and recognize life-long learning.
Category Archives: History/Government Games
How to teach history (and lots more) with Minecraft
A history teacher uses Minecraft to replicate a Japanese internment camp in order to teach student about US history.
How to teach history (and lots more) with Minecraft | VentureBeat.
iCivics
A collection of online games that teaches the fundamentals of government and law and encourages young people to become active in our democracy. iCivics is the vision of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and is created by a team of distinguished game scholars, designers, and curriculum specialists. In Do I Have A Right?, students learn their constitutional rights while helping clients and earning prestige points in a law firm.
iCivics does not identify a target audience but seems best suited to middle and high school students, and possibly early college.
