Tag Archives: mod

All Classes, Blog, Conference, Education Games, Humanities Games

Guest Blogger: Carolyn Stallard – On Modding

This week the CGN blog features Carolyn Stallard, adjunct instructor in the Music Department at Brooklyn College and member of the CUNY Games Network’s steering committee.

This past October, Carolyn presented an example of modding at the CUNY Graduate Center’s 9th Annual Pedagogy Day, organized by  the Psychology Department and the Graduate Student Teacher Association (GSTA). Visit the GSTA website to read her blog entry and learn more: https://teachpsych.org/page-1784686/6956917

If modding is interesting to you, consider attending the upcoming CUNY Games Conference and a full workshop on modding presented by Carolyn Stallard and Joe Bisz. Learn more and register for the conference here. 

If you are a graduate student teaching at CUNY, the GSTA is a great resource (and a supporter of the CGN). To learn more about the GSTA, follow their Twitter here or join their Facebook group here. 

Are you interested in being featured on the CGN website? If so, submit a blog post on any topic related to GBL in higher ed., and/or send links/descriptions of your blogs to contactcunygames@gmail.com. Stay tuned for another guest contribution next week. 

Humanities Games, Reading/Writing Games

“Comma”-nd and Conquer — Battleship Grammar Mod

1 Comment

I will upload the resources/assets I used for this lesson in the near future, but I just wanted to report the INCREDIBLE response I receive from my students for this exercise. Here is what I did: first, I gave students a short grammar lesson on commas, maybe a half-hour. Then I distributed a 7×7 grid on a sheet of paper and had students draw–secretly!–a three-square-long ship on it. I then paired them up and gave them sentences to punctuate. If they got a question right, they got a torpedo to launch at their partners, a la battleship. Anyone with a ship still afloat by the end of the exercise got a prize (this was a mistake, by the way; I should have said “Anyone who sinks a battleship gets a prize”).

This is the sort of “gamified” exercise that makes Ian Bogost rage against the machine, but the fact is that it is one of the best grammar lessons I’ve ever conducted. Students were eager to learn from their mistakes, eager to send their classmates to a watery grave, and audibly improving with comma usage as the lesson went on. I say “audibly” because they cheered and fist-pumped and cabbage-patched in their desks when they were right, and groaned when they missed a question. It was everything we want our classes to be. And it came about because of a simple, quick-and-dirty game mod.