Up Your Teaching Game: Creating Story-Based Games to Engage K-12 Students

Up Your Teaching Game offers K-12 teachers an intuitive and refreshingly fun pathway for creating immersive, story-based games that encourage students to experience the curriculum through play. Regardless of their technical abilities, design acumen, grade level, or domain, today’s teachers have fresh opportunities to create and implement their own content-based games based on the same techniques that video game designers use to create commercial video games. In five actionable steps, this book prepares educators to design curricular games that teach instead of test, that are derived from content rather than divergent from it, and that motivate students to take ownership over their learning. Programs that most teachers are familiar with, such as PowerPoint and Google Slides, and technologies that may be new to them, such as Twine and Scratch, are addressed alongside the use of their own classrooms and schools as game spaces. Novice and veteran teachers alike, as well as curriculum designers and school technologists, will find a wealth of strategies and lessons learned, tips for avoiding pitfalls and time constraints, examples of quests and storyline advancement, and much more.

Janna Kellinger is Professor in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA.