The Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel – Matt Kulling
“For many teachers, summer is a time to recharge and retool lesson plans. Others look for training opportunities to help them innovate in the classroom and make learning more tactile and fun. The latter is what an effort called Field Day Lab provided to about 25 Milwaukee-area teachers last week: Technical expertise to create mobile phone games and board games for use in the classroom. Dave Gagnon is the program director for Field Day, which is housed within the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s in charge of about a dozen software engineers who help produce physical and nonphysical experiences aimed at helping students learn new topics. Gagnon said the goal isn’t necessarily just to have students — and teachers — play games but to untether them from memorization-style learning. “This is a reframing of what teaching is,” he said. The teachers at the two-day session at Brown Deer High School last week learned to create games so that they could, in turn, help their students create games. Gagnon added that while many students can memorize basic facts, it takes true understanding of a topic to create a game that incorporates the systems, characters and spirit of that subject.”(more)