Tag: games

4 Jan 21 – But I’m Still Right About Other Stuff

I don’t want to seem braggadocios, but I’m pretty good at Guess Who. We play a lot of it over here. I mean, A. Lot.

Tonight, the 9yo and I were playing a round. I was the mustachioed Jake. If it’s been a minute, peep the image below. That’s Jake in the front row center. Shock of white hair, eager gleam in his eyes. Jake’s a paragon of happy-go-lucky. Look at that chin.

But, where is Emily going?

So, the 9yo asks, “Does your person have milk on his face?”

I reply in that tone parents get to use when their kids are charmingly naive, “You mean a mustache, buddy?” Gotta love the “buddy,” right?

He examines the faces before him. “No,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure you mean ‘mustache’,” I repeat. He’s been known to dig his heals in from time to time, so I decide to let it sit for a while. He’ll come around.

“No,” he says, “It’s not a mustache. It’s like milk right here.” He rubs the bottom of his chin.

Looking at my pal Jake and his stunning display of illustrated facial follicles. Poor kid’s confused.

“That’s just called a mustache,” I say, beginning to wonder why he’s having such a hard time with this. Also, why does he think a mustache is on the chin? Do I need to plan a teachable moment around facial hair? “Do you mean a milk mustache?” Placement would still be wrong, but I understand how he could forget the word.

Honestly, though, at this point I’ve used the word mustache at least three of four times. I’m wondering why he’s not picking it up.

9yo let’s out a sigh I swear had a whisper of “okay, boomer” in it. He removes his own playing card from his board, places it face down on the table and turns his board around.

Not pictured, my dignity.

In what I now realize was an enormous act of self control, he says, “Like this. It looks like milk on his chin.”

But his Jake didn’t look like my Jake because his Jake was Jon. That layabout hippie can shave a mustache, but can’t be bothered to shave his milk chin.

1/365: How Letterpress Uses Funds of Knowledge

Along with all the tedium of life (classes, laundry, work), I’ve been focusing quite a bit lately on an important issue. Letterpress.
If you haven’t downloaded this word game for iPhone and iPad, take a break from reading this and then come back. At the least, make note that you intend to check it out when you’re done reading.
A word-based game, the objective is to spell words given a random assortment of letter tiles. Spell and submit a word and those tiles turn your color. Your opponent then attempts to spell some other word and turn the tiles his color. The game is over when all tiles have been claimed, and the winner is the player with the most tiles of his color.
It’s Words with Friends meets Othello.
I’m not obsessed with the game. Dedicated is the word I choose.
Here’s the thing, it’s a new game and the developer is constantly updating the dictionary the app uses to determine whether a submitted word is, in fact, a word.
This is oftentimes frustrating. It’s not complete. The app doesn’t know all words.
Jew = Word
Jewish = Not a Word
There are other examples.
I’m no word genius, but I know some things, and so this incomplete dictionary has frustrated me on more than one occasion. At least twice, in the throes of a fantastic game, I’ve put my phone down and walked away in frustration saying, “It is too a word!”
The whole experience has me thinking of Moll et al’s theory of funds of knowledge.
At its simplest, Moll proposes taking teachers as researchers into the homes of their students and asking the question, “What is the knowledge that’s created, valued, and used in this space?”
From there, these teacher anthropologists take what they’ve learned and draw on those funds of knowledge in crafting their lesson plans and shaping their teaching practice.
If the parallels here aren’t jumping out, let me be more direct.
Letterpress is operating like a traditional classroom. It presents the possible tools for making sense and succeeding. Within those boundaries, it allows players to construct meaning and submit those constructions for approval. This is what teachers do on a regular basis.
What also happens on a regular basis, though, is the construction of new ways of organizing and implementing tools to make meaning. Not yet realizing there’s a way of learning things, students may accidentally take risks and imagine new possibilities. Oftentimes, because of a rubric or the learning objective of the task at hand, those risks and that imagination are re-directed toward the intended goal – either frustrating the child or shutting down those paths to future learning.
Letterpress and traditional teaching depart in their approaches to the idea of upgrading. For Letterpress, developers realize they need to improve the user experience to make that experience worthwhile. Find the expectations and funds of knowledge of the user and make the game more inclusive.
For classrooms, the goal is often to upgrade the user or student. Keep the game the same and get students to develop a better understanding of the rules.
The difference?
When I put down Letterpress in frustration, I come back because there is the promise the experience will improve.
When students turn away from education and schools in frustration, we can’t say the same thing.

Things I Know 350 of 365: This is a brilliant waste of time

Last week, a former student posted a link to this game to Facebook with an apology for the time suck she had just unleashed on the life of anyone who clicked through. (I echo that same apology here.)

I’ve kept the window open the entire time.

I’ve played the game while participating in entire conversations with my family of which I have little-to-no memory once I realize what’s happened.

Today, I ventured off the game page, up a level to the list of games written by the game’s architect William Hoza.

I have two questions:

  1. Where did he learn how to do this?
  2. Would giving students a choice between this work and whatever course their school schedules after Algebra I be a totally uncalled for idea?

Things I Know 301 of 365: It was one hell of a game of musical chairs

All around the Mulberry Bush,
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to scratch his nose
Pop! goes the weasel.

The requisite announcements had been completed, the student skit designed to encourage students to keep on track in the new trimester had been performed. I was feeling certain community circle was about to wrap up and the students of Codman Academy were about to head to classes.

I was wrong.

The sophomore with the microphone announced it was time for Crew Olympics. The couple hundred assembled high school students took a collective moment before the crowd was peppered with the start of cheers. Our host had another announcement. The game – musical chairs. The competitors – the faculty.

At 9:45 in this school that has had 100% of its graduates accepted to 4-year colleges saw the faculty who helped make that happen walk down the aisles of the meeting hall to represent their crews. Crews are what Codman calls its advisories, and these teachers were out to represent.

The chairs were assembled, Reel to Real’s “I like to move it” blasted from the PA and the teachers started circling the chairs – slowly. Painfully slowly. No one wanted to be out. Some deep pre-schoolian instincts were revived. Plus, they were doing it for the kids.

The first few eliminations were mundane. Expectedly, the more timid of the teachers were the first to go. They had spirit, but realized the dangers of the sport.

Things got interesting when Round 4 signaled the beginning of double eliminations. By that point, those teachers who remained were in it to win. A few went for chairs and found themselves on the floor. As they exited the arena, they were applauded and cheered for. Those who remained high-fived and “good game”-ed as they left.

A few rounds later, there were three. Somewhere, on the other side of the hall, chanting started. To quote the great Neil Diamond, “like a small earthquake.” Before long, little else could be heard other than the blaring of a hundred voices calling for their champion.

In that round, he fell.

Literally, he ended up on the ground.

The two others who remained helped him up and shook his hand.

I looked around.

Somewhere in the course of the 10 minutes of the game, the crowd had taken to its feet. I realized I was leaning in. I’d even picked my favorite in my head.

The music picked up somewhere in the middle of Beyoncé’s “Single ladies.” The competitors – two grown, college-educated men – circled a plastic chair. The students screamed in glee. The music played longer than it had in any other turn. On one down beat, the contestants thought the music stopped and attempted to sit only to be cheered on by the crowd. We would see the game played out.

Greg, one of my classmates from school completing his practicum at Codman, was the first to sit. But, his opponent lunged to lie flat across the seat as Greg was sitting back. The judges swarmed in as the chair and the two men toppled backward.

Seconds later, Greg’s opponent was named the winner and first his crew, then the entire room exploded in applause.

As both men, appropriately dizzy, walked back to their seats, a retraction was made.

Greg had won.

The students were dismissed. Classes began.

The entire episode took 15 minutes of the day. This semester, we’ve studied what Richard Elmore refers to as the Instructional Core – students, teachers, and content. When writing about this concept, Ted Sizer also included how the content was delivered as a fourth aspect.

In this game of musical chairs, the school and its faculty had taught many lessons.

The students had seen their teachers more fully and developed more complex understandings of who they were as people. They saw what sportsmanship could look like. While the teachers good-naturedly ribbed one another during the game, each eliminated player was sent out with a handshake or high five. Those leaving the game did so with smiles on their faces. They’d done what they’d come to do – play.

Though the teachers were representing separate crews, those separations never kept them from enjoying and supporting the whole. If all they’d been thinking of were their crews, the game could never have started.

No one processed any of this with the students. It happened and the day moved on. As it should have. There are times to reflect and their are times for ritual. This game of musical chairs was silly, fun and energizing. And, it was ritual – an act of community to remind members who they are, of what they are a part, and how they play together.

Things I Know 184 of 365: I’ve got too many friends and not enough words

Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words!

– Eliza Doolittle

I might be in a little over my head.

I just woke up my phone to check the time.

Twenty-one people are waiting for my next move on Words with Friends.

Every time I get the chance, I chip away at my waiting games. On a good run, I can knock out five turns before the rest of life jumps in. But they keep. Coming. Back.

They keep challenging me.

I’m not even sure how it got this bad. I remember sharing my user name with maybe three people, never 21.

I’m not even very good. Of the 21 games queued up, I’m losing around 80% of them. Still, I play.

Then there are the invites at the end of the game. Just as my phone alerts me to my defeat and I click “re-match,” that same friend begins yet another game with me. In the face of such double booking, a rational person would resign from one game and keep the other game in play.

That’s just what they want you to do. Admit defeat before every playing a move? No, sir, thank you very much. If I’m to lose, it will be a beautiful and bloody battle.

Then there are the cheaters.

You know who you are…cough…Robbie…cough. Cheaters I’ve perhaps taught for two years in a row and with whose vocabularies I am well familiar. “Shoon?” Really?

Again, the rational person would resign the game knowing their vocabulary was reduced to a switchblade in the face of the nuclear armament of online Words with Friends cheating sites.

Not I.

For losses to a cheater are the sweetest losses of all. If I lose to a cheater, I can tell myself that I would otherwise have won, which, ipso facto, makes me the winner…who lost.

I’m not losing these games because I’m stupid. I’ve got words in my head. I’ve been gearing up for all 21 of these battles since I was in middle school and thought accusing friends of having “minuscule vernaculars” was the best blend of adolescent humor and linguistic insult one was likely to find.

At issue is my lack of strategy. I’m smart, but don’t play smartly. I like the words too much to toss them around like taudry tiles which have no more use to me than to help me score. Oh, I’ll score, but when I do, it will be because I’ve shaped and sculpted my letters into a Monet of syllables. Grown men will weep and children will feel a deep and abiding sense of hope.

And then, I will lose.