If you are a teacher, we want to build these games with your content
We would like to collaborate with teachers to help stimulate interest in the material they teach and to help students learn material through simple games. We have built 6 games (non-commercial, free access for all) and supplied them with sample material, topics we find interesting. Each game explores a different way to present the material to emphasize different parts of the topic. We want to work with you to add your material to these games specifically for your students.
The games can be rapidly extended with your unique content. The format lends itself best to history and works particularly well for date- or numeric-based material (e.g., city latitudes), but also for alphabetically-sorted items. After we receive materials for a new topic (see below for content requirements), we can have the games ready for use within a day.
We suggest a student project where the students build a spreadsheet of content for a topic, gather images for those items, and we can create a customized set of games for each student (or team). We will create a separate web page for the set of games from each class. We have learned more by building the content (it is similar to taking notes) as from playing the games, and the games are the reward. We have precise directions and examples.
Teacher-created content of course works very well, and we are happy to do most of the work for the teacher.
On our website you can view and explore our games which are currently supplied with the following sample topics: the history of science, the history of art, literature, music composers, history by objects from the British Museum, facts from nature, and city latitudes.
We have no commercial agenda, no restriction of use (though your material will not be shared with anyone other than your students without your written permission), and no financial implications, though we hope eventually to recover hosting costs.
Our goals at Ideate Games are:
- to see if this approach (teacher-provided content and/or student-created content turned into games) is of value to educators and students
- to determine (from the level of effort) if this approach with the framework and automation can scale and can be be cost- and time-effective for teachers, as a toolkit schools can use for free
- to build better learning tools and better games
Iif this approach proves valuable, we will add more (free) games to the framework over time.
Interested teachers please contact us at
IdeateGames@gmail.com.
Content
For detailed instructions about how to create content for these games, view or download the instructions in
html format or
pdf format. A summary is below.
The content in these games is a sample of topics to show what can be done and hopefully to stimulate interest in these topics (and because we had fun learning about these topics). The content is a database of descriptions and images for discrete items arranged in topics. Each topic is created as a simple spreadsheet of 8 columns:
- Description
- Clues [this is a list of clues; for each game, one clue is randomly selected for each item]
- Location [used often as a clue and included as a category in the Buckets game]
- Date [or any entry that can be programatically ordered; ties are acceptable]
- Agent [usually a person responsible for the event or item, but can be anything -- this is just another clue, and used in the Buckets game as a category]
- Category [used for the Buckets game and for the strategy in the Paths game]
- Image [must be unique across the database; we can rename these as needed, but the names can also be used in the game]
- Image Credit URL [where the image came from, to give attribution credit]
We have used a variety of content to experiment with how well different kinds of content work (learning vs fun) in this game framework. Any topic is easily added, requiring that each item have a numeric value (or some determined order such as alphabetic) and a unique image. Text is organized to deliver cues, hints, descriptions, depending on the game.
The games we have created contain 50-100 entries in each topic, though they work with as few as 25 entries and as many as 300 entries. The 'Culture' topic is a combination of 3 other topics, about 250 items.
For teacher-supplied or student-supplied topics, we will build a separate security-protected space for the students, if desired.
We are also interested in creating special topics for non-educators, though would ask nominal fees to help defray our hosting costs.
