Where should teachers interested in structuring a class as a game start?

[David Carlton]

I was thinking that some of the teachers (and some of the parents - it's a parent-participation school) in the school that my daughter attends might be interested in some of Roger's experiments.  So I was planning to I'd point them at Roger's Operation KTHMA posts.

But, now that I think about it, I'm not sure how accessible those posts are - somebody who isn't already a gamer might have a hard time turning those into concrete class ideas.  Heck, looking through the posts, I'm not sure that many teachers who are gamers could pull it off - e.g. the early Operation KTHMA posts don't even mention the Honeycomb Engine, which I gather is a pretty important structuring device in the experiment.

Maybe that's okay; certainly these experiments are new enough that there just isn't a well-paved path out there yet.  And a teacher who isn't sympathetic to games in teaching would probably reject the ideas no matter how they were presented.  But I'm wondering if there's a middle ground of sympathetic ears that we could reach even at this early stage.

Thoughts?  Roger, is there a post that I missed when skimming through your blog that's a practical introduction to ideas for teachers?

[Roger Travis]

There's Quest2Learn, now, which is working on similar lines, and there's the work of Jim Gee.

But you're right that we need to start working on a ground-up approach, and I'm moving in that direction on two fronts--with Corvus, with whom I'll someday soon produce a classroom edition of the HCE and with my colleague here and at UConn Mike Young. My next project is to design an online course that will provide a toolbox for teachers who want to try out some of these things in the classroom.

[David Carlton]

Oh, cool! Quest2Learn seems interesting, and I'll certainly point local teachers at your course when you launch it.