The sun has risen on my tenth year of teaching middle school.  But this year wouldn't be like the rest.  No, I wasn't going to teach like I had always taught before.  This year I'm going to 'game' my 8th grade Geography classroom and this blog is a chronicle of what has worked and what has failed throughout the year.  Its for those of you curious about integrating game elements into your job and for me as a record of what I tried this year.

Background:
I've been playing games since the Apple IIe.  I have fond memories of fording the Columbia River on Oregon Trail and avoiding the troll in the eponymous Troll Tale.  I've played most gaming platforms since, including board games and video games.  I still maintain that gaming is a vital part of my mental health, just ask my wife.
I got the idea of playing games in the classroom while teaching world history and playing Civilizations at home.  I was always frustrated though, at the gap between educational usefulness and engagement. Games were either too teach-ey or too recreational to succeed in the classroom.

Then I started my MA at the University of St. Thomas in the field of Educational Technology.  In researching my final thesis paper I stumbled across two authors that started to change how I approached games in the classroom.
James Paul Gee and Jane McGonigal have both shown me new ways to think of games in my classroom.
Lee Sheldon more recently has helped put method to the madness and given a mold I can steal ideas from that has been tried and reviewed in a real world classroom.  I will delve deeper into their respective influences in later posts.

Fast forward: At the end of last year I realized I kept talking about doing something great and decided it was time to actually do it.  Enough talking and planning.  Time to start gaming.  So I piloted a few mini projects and lesson ideas with my classes and committed to gaming my classroom for the following year.  It appeared that all the pieces were in place to start on my own quest to turn my classroom into a game room where learning and gaming were an everyday occurrence.

Next week:
How did the first week of school go....