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Objectives:
Understand the need to rise to the challenge of unfamiliar tasks and responsibilities; experiment, take risks and seek resources to learn and grow and model all of these behaviors for learners
Examine and choose motivation strategies to increase engagement to support and enhance learning
Leverage tools and techniques to foster self-directed learning
The Game
My Genius Hour project was the development of a year-long game that combined global challenges, physical component design, electronic sensors, and web servers into an integrated and exciting way to experience class each day. The goal is survive and thrive as individuals and as a class. Every player controls their own plots of land and virtual people, but many actions have interdependent effects that create conflicts and challenges between players. The game is played on a huge physical board, but each plot also has a virtual representation that tracks finances, health, and happiness.
Your Artifact Reflection
This artifact highlights both the outcome and process of classroom innovation. As a process, it is still a work-in-progress, it is public, and it is very open to critique. As a result, I think it is a really cool way to experience deep, authentic learning about global issues and emerging technology. I selected it, and am proud of it, because it integrates so many of my course goals in a single theme / context. It would have been much easier to create many small projects to teach students about each piece of technology, then send them home with articles to read about global problems. Even if students found it interesting, hands-on, and real-world-applicable, it wouldn't empower most of them. The global problems would be disconnected from each other and would have nothing to do with the tech.
With this class, I really wanted to foster and support student empowerment and self-directed learning (the graduate course objectives). The method I chose was creating a powerful experience. This game starts with a peaceful, clean, happy world. Over time, due to scarce resources and lots of built-in challenges, conflict will emerge, pollution will spread, space will be eaten up by the growing population, and students will probably not agree on the best step forward. Essentially, I am giving students the power to screw up the world on their own. As the game progresses and the interdependent effects of the problems hurt everyone, the class will need to pull together to solve the world's problems. If this classroom experience plays out anything like I am envisioning, it will be hard for students to not be empowered on their path to fix the mess they made. As we get later in the year, if I can help students translate this feeling and set of skills to real world needs all around them, it will be amazing.
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