Just a fyi, I updated wordpress and once again had some trouble with it so if anything is broke please let me know.
Upgrading the blog software makes me feel like I do when I have to take my vehicle into the mechanic. It should be easy but it never is. Whenever you change one thing it turns out there are other things broken.
Next time my hosting bill is due I’m going to bite the bullet and move to a host that automatically updates wordpress for you.
I’ve been trying to keep somewhat productive during the pandemic (until my gallbladder started acting up but I’m fine now). Rather than writing or researching, I did something easier: scanning in stuff and uploading it to archive.org. I’ve mostly scanned in posters that came with issues of Edge magazine. I don’t know if they still do these but for several years they would do wall calendars that had Nintendo themes on them. I’ve scanned in all the Edge posters so now I’m starting to scan in a few other things (and I may have uploaded some pdfs that I didn’t scan).
So if anyone has any interest in them, here they are: https://archive.org/details/@jccalhoun
The other day I was at work waiting on the microwave to finish and glanced over at the recycling bin and noticed an issue of Ed Tech magazine. Now I had never heard of this magazine but the cover caught my eye:
An article on how a college IT staff can help launch an esports team. I had to grab it out of recycling and make a copy of it.
So, in violation of all sorts of copyright, here is the article:
The article ends with a link to their website where they have a whitepaper on esports.
I have been skeptical about educational games. I’ve also been skeptical about “serious games” (I used to say I was more interested in “frivolous games” but it never seemed to catch on). I’ve also been down on narrative in games.
So it should come as no surprised that last semester I taught a course on videogame narrative where I had students play games with narratives and serious games.
It was an interesting experience not only because I was teaching something I wasn’t super into but also because I had been working on my main teaching gig so much that I barely had time to create the syllabus for this class. So for the first time in many years I was teaching a week ahead of what I was reading.
It ended up being a fun class if a bit chaotic. I’ll post my syllabus below if anyone is interested in it.
I was most proud of how I turned educational games on their head. Instead of having students play educational games I had them make games that illustrate the concepts of the course and I think it worked really well.
I’m not a programmer and I didn’t want to set any expectations of my student’s computer skills so I had them use Twine. There was a learning curve so I had them make a basic game and I also made a little tutorial twine as well as a google doc with a bunch of twine resources.
The games they made weren’t super polished. We kind of ran out of time and if I teach it again I will really try to give them more time to revise it. However, they were really creative and interesting. So here are the games my students made.
Here is the calendar and readings for the class: