This book really open my eyes about education, games and learning. We as a human race have been playing games since the beginning of time. Games are a way to collaborate with others, talk about ideas and strategy as well as have fun. Growing up in the 90's it was kind of a weird time for games and technology. Gaming was starting to be more popular the internet had just been invented and it was a new frontier for learning and technology. In school we didn't really play games it was more of a solo education where you didn't really learn from your peers. You did your own work, you were to be quiet and it really wasn't a community of learning. I didn't really have a community learning until college where we would have class discussions about specific topics. This was odd to me because I had not been accustomed to this. A lot of people dislike common core in my area we see signs in peoples front yard to stop common core. I really like the communication students have with common core it allows them to help each other and to build ideas. I have been back to work teaching for two weeks. I wanted to implement this gaming ideas with my students right away. I gave them a choice on different games they could work as a team and they chose building. I had the students move into 3 groups and they had over 100 blocks. The goal was to build the strongest structure. They were working as a team, learning different ways to build and using their skills to put this task into practice. They really enjoyed this activity. The end result was to test their structure by putting book on top of the structures to see how much weight it would hold. The task was a success that would have been frowned upon in years past. What did we learn: The students worked as a team, they used critical thinking skills, they had to take ideas from their peers to make their design better, they had to test their results. I learned all of these ideas from the book. Games really do change our ideas about learning and makes learning more enjoyable. We have grown so much in the last twenty years learning from games. It's very exciting on what the future holds.
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