Player's Manual

Greetings!

Welcome to what will hopefully be one of the most unique courses of your college career. This course is gamified, which means that game elements have been embedded to enhance the learning experience throughout this summer. You may be sitting here thinking, why would you gamify a college course and I will tell you…research has shown that when the focus is solely on getting the grade, it has a negative effect on motivation and the enjoyment of learning (Matera, 2015). What this means is that learning should be engaging and fun, not anxiety provoking or boring.

In special education, teachers work with students who have often become disengaged with learning because playing the game of school excludes them from understanding the power their assets bring to the game. Our goal for this course is to change the game in our understanding how to support individuals who are neuro or physically divergent by accessing their strengths and not their weaknesses. The way that we will do that is through participating in a variety of quests, activities, and battles, individually and as a team. Along our journey you will opportunity to level up from being "meddling kids" to "super sleuths", gathering power ups and special items along the way.

Essential Materials

There are some essential tools to make the most of your experience:

• The Special Education Guidebook - This guidebook (your textbook) will provide you with essential knowledge in helping you understand some of the characters, quests, activities, and battles that you will encounter throughout the summer.

Kirk, S., Gallagher, J., & Coleman, M. R. (2015). Educating Exceptional Children, 14th Edition, Stanford: CT, Cengage Learning. ISBN: 978-1-285-45134-3.

• Player's Manual - This outlines how the basics of playing the game work (course syllabus). This will include essential individual student assignment due dates. Due dates are not so much dates as they are Due Weeks. Anytime throughout the Week you may submit the Quest for feedback to earn your XP faster. Completing more quests helps

• Mystery Machine Cargo Box - This is where some autonomy comes into play. Our game will encompass a lot of outside the box thinking, which leads to a lot of creative results. Take time to think what you might want to pack in your cargo box to enhance your gameplay. Some examples of items could be paper, markers, colored pencils, playdough, clay, Legos, pipe cleaners, string, popsicle sticks, etc. Don't limit yourself. If you think of other items not in this list, feel free to add them. Creativity and Innovation is the name of the game!

Sleuth squads

This course is designed to be collaborative, meaning that you can work in squads. These squads have been pre-selected, not because I did not want to provide you with choice, but because you each bring unique perspectives and assets to the game, and you can't always experience those when you are paired with your friends. You can view the members of your group on the Group Tab on D2L. However, you may choose to work independently, but it may be more challenging to complete the tasks and activities.

Your First Tasks

Below are your first few tasks that you can choose to get started with before our game begins. Completing these tasks will lead to developing your first few experience points (XP) for yourself and your squad (note: XPs are not tied to grades, but are there to help you level up and have access to power ups and items to enhance the game):