ThinkFun's Education Blog
Here to help parents make learning fun!

Ever wonder how to sneak a little creativity and literacy into your science lessons without departing too far from your curriculum? Blackout poetry is a great way to use science, creative nonfiction text, and magazines to create found poetry masterpieces with your students.

Various playful and gaming aspects can be used in learning; some of them require our imagination and nothing else, others are more demanding and work best with special attributes, classroom themes, and so on. Teachers have to use all their creativity to reenact all those learning ideas and set up the right atmosphere.

All games are systems: the rules (or constraints), components (game pieces), space (from a soccer field to a game board to a tablet screen), and goal (to win!) interconnect. A game’s interconnected system is driven by player actions; as players learn a game, they also learn its system. Scholar James Paul Gee wrote, “Games encourage players to think about relationships, not isolated events, facts, and skills. In a game like Rise of Nations, for instance, players need to think of how each action taken might impact their future actions and the actions of the other players playing against them as they each move their civilizations through the Ages.” Similar to the aforementioned civilization building game Rise of Nations, the city management series SimCity tasks players with balancing a complex urban system. Another systems thinking game is Plague, Inc., in which players release a pathogen into a map of the world. Playing it illustrates how actual infections spread around the globe.