Gaming. And How! September 23, 2006
Posted by Christopher Harris in : Community , 2commentsHaving presented a brief introduction to gaming, here are some suggestions for games that might work in a school library. The focus here is on free or inexpensive games that avoid some of the more troubling or controversial issues in gaming. In other words, no Dungeons & Dragons (though it is a great game and integrates nicely with libraries) and certainly nothing like Grand Theft Auto (ugh!).
Card Games (Dedicated Deck)
We are starting with dedicated deck card games because they offer ane asy point of entry into the world of gaming. There are no hardware requirements (though some may require dice or counters of some sort) and they tend to be relatively inexpensive (around $20).
Quiddler
One of my favorite games is Quiddler, from Set Games. The best way to describe this game is Gin Rummey meets Scrabble(tm). Play involves drawing and discarding cards to form groups, but the cards are all letters and the goal is to form words! This is an incredible language and vocabulary game. When you are sitting there staring at your hand of letters, you basically have to scroll your mind through a list of every word you know to find some that you could create. A full game, seven rounds of play that proceed from a hand size of three cards to a hand size of ten cards, takes about an hour, but a single round can take only minutes. Think about the possiblities. Have a deck available as an option for students in the library so when they are “hanging out” they can also be enriching their minds. Or, have a Quiddler letter set up as a daily puzzle…only where could you find a daily letter set? Well, the Quiddler website has a daily puzzle that you can use as well as a printout for a daily school worksheet.
Quiddler: $12.00 – Available online or find a local store by zip code.
Fluxx
If you want to teach students to be flexible, adaptable, information literate people, I can think of few games more suited to that task than Fluxx. Why? Well, Fluxx is a pretty simple game. There is only one rule, you see, you draw one card and then you play one card. That’s it. How do you win? I don’t know…nobody has played a card that allows someone to win. We will have to wait and see what develops. Understanding and applying rules to master a situation, really the heart of gaming, also happens to be a critical skill in information literacy. What is Internet searching but trying multiple paths and working through ever-shifting information tracks? Game play for Fluxx varies greatly depending on the cards, but an average game length is probably about 15 minutes. There is also a new science based version of Eco-Fluxx.
Fluxx: $8.95 – $12.95. Available online or find a local store.
Computer Games
This gets a bit tricker in libraries. Many computer games require powerful computers with dedicated graphics cards – something you don’t find much of in schools. Still, I thought long and hard to come up with two suggestions that I think have a great deal of promise for library use.
Show this to your Administrators – September 13, 2006
Posted by ayucht in : Community , 1 comment so farFrom the California DOE, a Crisis Response Box: a Guide to Help Every School Assemble the Tools and Resources Needed for a Critical Incident Response. The 18 page PDF available at http://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/ss/cp/documents/crisisrespbox.pdf outlines the steps necessary to assemble an emergency response plan for local school/districts, and includes examples of the documents needed to ensure that “school adminstrators will immediately have the information essential for effective management of a major crisis incident.”
For additional resources, see http://aliceyucht.pbwiki.com/CrisisPlanningResources
Best Practices of Other Businesses September 12, 2006
Posted by mkowalsky in : Community , 2comments
I wonder if anyone has seen photos of the home library of ALA President Leslie Burger — the Princeton Public Library in New Jersey. Many elements of best practice in promotion, facilities, public relations, services, and technology are evident in these photos, posted by Jenny Levine of the Shifted Librarian blog.
Feelings of retail abound — aspects of their library makes it sometimes seem like a music store, a bookstore, a clothing store, or a department store — all with lots of smiling, helpful employees nearby in case you need assistance. These elements are familiar to our users, especially children of the K-12 age (I think we can challenge the cereal aisle!!). It is easy to see from the photos that this library is bright, colorful, well-stocked, and inviting — and fr. It may look like retail space in some ways, but then we remind users that everything is free!
If you’re a school library media specialist like me, you’ve got lots of ideas and not a lot of library budget to spend on them. But I got a few ideas from these photos that I’d like to implement right away. . .let me know if you do some of these things also, and tell us about your students’ reactions. For example, as I was writing this, I realized I never stopped to take some faculty photos with books to put up in our library in the way that the ALA READ posters do with celebrities. Right away, a student overheard me explaining this to someone and volunteered to help.
Now our library media center is adorned with photos of one of our science teachers reading a book on DNA, and one of our coaches hugging Tennis for Dummies! Students were pleasantly surprised and talk of the images filtered through students of all grades and academic levels.
Here are my next few easy/cheap/best practice ideas that were inspired by Princeton. . .
- drag out a table somewhere to could “layer” with books like the bookstores do (”Book Group Books” photo above)
- turn a few of the end books on each shelf to show their faces forward instead of their spines
- update signage ASAP, even if I have to print signs out myself (perhaps with some manga or cartoon characters pointing to the subject or genre areas)
- prop up a television (or cheap/donated flat-screen monitor) to advertise library resources or services
Plus, I need an audio station! Um. . .my students need an audio station!! I can easily put some speakers on a public workstation and keep the browser open to streaming audio (maybe NPR’s five-minute news for my social studies students). Then I can prop up an iPod dock (ask someone to bring one in who is not home enough to listen to it anyway!), and connect it to a public workstation computer with iTunes. Then students can listen to podcasts from Nature magazine, or even their teachers!
Thanks, Leslie, for being a blogging President, and for inspiring us all to transform our libraries into information centers that teens want to visit early and often.
A Game by Any Other Name September 11, 2006
Posted by Christopher Harris in : Community , 1 comment so farA game, in the sense that we are addressing the word, basically refers to a structured activity, bound by rules and actions, intended to engage and entertain. There have been many different games throughout history, from light parlor games like charades of Victorian England to the deadly serious juego de pelota of the ancient Americas. Just as baseball was the all-American game that defined the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, today’s gaming landscape is similarly dominated by video games. Let’s take a look closer look at video games as well as some of the vocabulary you might encounter when talking to gamers.
Gaming Glossary
- Video Game: A game that uses a video display (either a television or a compute r monitor) to present an electronic environment with which and in which the player interacts.
- Computer Game: Video games designed to be played on a computer and a computer monitor. They sometimes offer a higher complexity of interaction because of the additional control inputs from the keyboard and mouse/joystick combination.
- Console Game: Video game consoles are all-in-one devices that attach to televisions and contain the necessary hardware to display games stored on discs or cartridges. Examples are Sony’s Playstation line, Nintendo’s GameCube, or Microsoft’s X-Box line.
- Online Game: Some video games have evolved to a new type of interactive play with or against other people around the world made possible by the Internet. Some video games may include an online mode, while other games can only be played online.
- MMORPG: Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) like Everquest or World of Warcraft are examples of a wildly popular genere of online games. These games, built in huge worlds that only exist on game servers, develop cultures, economies, and new social laws as hundreds of thousands of players interact. World of Warcraft, which has attracted young professionals, has even been referred to as the new “golf” of business.
- Card Games: This usually refers to “dedicated deck card games” – those games that use a special set of cards as opposed to a standard of playing cards. The use of dedicated cards allows a new set of interactions within a familiar set of rules. An early example is the French Mille Bornes, designed in 1954.
- Collectable/Trading Card Games: Card games like Yu-Gi-Oh! or Magic are played with a selected deck of cards from a vast library of possible cards. Players have to collect or trade (read purchase, and bring a lot of money!) huge sets of cards to build more powerful decks. Some of the rarer cards may cost hundreds of dollars.
Not only are there many different types of games, each type of game has its own set of genres. There are action, strategy, sports, simulations, role-playing, puzzle and many other styles of games. Some of these, while great fun, are just not appropriate for school libraries. Let’s get that right out in the open. I, as an adult gamer, play games that are not intended for children. They may, for instance, contain content that is not appropriate for children. This doesn’t mean the games are “bad” any more than R-rated movies or books with more mature content are bad. In other cases, it may have nothing to do with content, but may simply be a reflection of rules that are too complex for younger players to understand, or the levels of prior knowledge, reading ability, or processing requirements may just be too advanced for children. This is why it is critcal to check ratings, read reviews, and playtest games before sharing them with any children – including your own!
A Gamer’s Vocabulary
One of the attributes that sets gaming just outside of our comfort zone for understanding is the use of a gaming vocabulary that we aren’t familiar with. Encountering gamers talking about their games is almost like entering a foreign country that speaks a similar language. While it sounds like English, it is a dialect so wrought with gaming terminology that it just doesn’t make sense. Here are some of the words you may hear. Italicized words refer in a definition refer to other words in this glossary.
- Boss: a large monster at the end of a level that must be defeated in order for your character to move forward. Most boss monsters have some sort of hidden weakness that the player must identify and then exploit in order to win.
- Character: The player is the person playing the game, but many games feature a main character that is the in-game manifestation of that player. Some games focus on the role-playing aspect of melding player and charcter while other games force the player to manage multiple characters or to adopt a character viewpoint of a city or even a nation.
- d: This shortened form of dice is used to define a number to sides ratio when calling for the generation of a random number through the use if a die roll. For instance 2d6 refers to the use of two, six-sided dice which provides a random number between 2 and 12. Dice come with a variety of sides including 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, and 100. A great teaching trick is to use 10 sided dice (with the digits 0-9) to create math problems!
- Experience Points (Exp or XP): A measure of a character’s development and progress that typically determines that character’s level. In games that use Exp, a character recieves points for completing tasks, killing monsters or successfully performing other actions. Players may also loose Exp for making incorrect choices or as a penalty for death.
- Level: 1)noun – a distinct section of a game in which certain goals must be accomplished before the character can proceed forward. 2)noun – a designated range of experience points that is usually linked to the power, attributes, and skills of a character or monster. 3) verb – to move forward to a new section of a game or to reach a new range of experience.
- Life: A try. While some games offer a “hardcore” mode where death means a total end to the game and restarting from the beginning, most games have a way to save the progress you have made and allow you to restart from some middle point on a new attempt.
- 1337: An adopted spelling for “leet” which stands for elite. A good player or something well executed.
- Monster (mob): The abbreviation stands for “mobile.” See non-player character.
- Newbie: a new player, usually someone who is learning the game and prone to mistakes. Spelled this way, it is a neutral term with overtones of acceptance for the fact that everyone was once a newbie and being a newbie is the only way to become 1337 – spelled n00b, it is much more rude.
- Non-Player Character (NPC): As opposed to being a character that is player (human) controlled, NPCs are controlled by the game. In many multiplayer games, groups of characters band together to defeat powerful NPCs, or lone players spend countless hours attacking NPCs for experience.
- N00B (Note the zeros for the Os): As with many of the adopted spelling words in gaming, numbers are used to replace similarly formed letters. This is an adopted spelling for a derogatory use of another gaming term, newbie.
- Pwn: This adopted spelling for “own” refers to the total and complete defeat of an opponent. It is often used as a derogatory term usually directed towards a n00b.
Armed with this vocabulary, you are probably ready to tackle some gaming. What games might be appropriate for your library? As a passionate gamer with plenty of experience (and gladly undertaking more “testing” on a regular basis), I will be presenting some ideas on games that could work for you in the next post.
