Gaming - Online Learning Experience

Upon exploring the Michigan Merit Curriculum's Online Learning Experience Guideline document I found some Educational Gaming experiences that I would like to share with my Biology students.  When we study ecology we discuss populations and liming factors for populations.  We not only talk about plants and animals but we discuss human populations and what limits the human population.  I reviewed two educational games in the guidelines,  Food Force and Darfur is Dying.

I felt that both of these educational games could help teach about limiting factors and world population growth during our biology unit on Ecology and Human Population.  Both gaming experiences were very engaging for students.  Darfur is Dying provides a role playing experience.  What I would really like to create is a cross-curricular unit between science and social studies that could be centered around the Darfur is Dying game.   Food Force is a game that is tied to Facebook which would make it difficult to play in schools.  Most schools, that I am aware of, block Facebook.  There are many other good resources on the website that connects to the game Food Force but students would need instructions and as a teacher I would need to decide how to best utilize those resources.

I didn't feel that either of the games presented a technological difficulty for students unless the games don't work on an iPad. As the guidelines indicated, I felt the games were integrating, helped develop life-long skills and required teacher involvement in different ways.  In Darfur is Dying the teacher could serve as a facilitator and guide but with Food Force the teacher would need to serve a more active role.

The Online Learning Experience Guide outlines the Core Principles of Online Learning and focusing just on Darfur is Dying I believe it met many of the Core Principles especially the following:

• Be organized in a coherent, sequential manner 
• Include the principles of Universal Design for Learning 
• (http://www.cast.org/research/udl/index.html ) by providing multiple approaches to meet the needs of diverse learners 
• Be relevant and address many learning styles 
• Include asynchronous and/or synchronous interaction between teacher and student, and student-to-student 

I was interested in the concept of Educational Gaming and think my students would enjoy and learn from integrating these into the curriculum and a possible cross-curricular unit with social studies.