Get Your Game On: Lesson on Instruction from the Video Game Industry

Kids stay engaged in video games for hours. Many educators are beginning to suggest that there are things about instruction we can learn from video games. Can we present our content and skills using the formula the gaming industry has leveraged to keep gamers coming back for more…

Think about Angry Birds…12 million people have downloaded this and spent hours on what is essentially a tremendously simple game.  No fancy graphics, action or blood.  Just a slingshot and some blocks! We can learn a lot from video games.  Click the following links for posts on how we can teach like Angry Birds!

Five Lessons on Teaching from Angry Birds: Dan Meyer

1. Make it easy to start the task.
2.  Show, don’t tell.
3. Give useful and immediate feedback.
4. Make it easy to recover from failure.
5. Complicate the task gradually.

Learning from Angry Birds: Barbara Bray

Getting Your Game On: Andrew Miller (Curriculum Units)

These three articles are well worth a read for any educator interested in learning how to engage teenagers in their content!