We are Batman

Perfect analogy and well written.

Antleader's Journey

In a Writing Center Practice class on Thursday, I lead a discussion on three readings about disability.  They were:

• Autism and Rhetoric (Paul Heilker and Melanie Yergeau)
• Learning Disabilities and the Writing Center (Julie Neff)
• Transcending “Conversing”: A Deaf Student in the Writing Center (Margaret E. Weaver)

I want to focus on one thing during the discussion and that involves me deciding to have the final word.  But before I write what I said, I want to give you a quick overview of what I was all responding to.

We were discussing the question, “Should we know that a student is disabled when they come into the writing center?”  One of the students in the class is a parent of two children with autism.  This parent told the entire class that we were, in essence, burying our heads in the sand and ignoring the reality of college.  This was in response to the…

View original post 784 more words

Blogcast on Youtube

To wrap up this project, we have created a Youtube video version of our podcast (the Blogcast). Check it out!

Hope you enjoyed our misadventures!

Leave a comment and tell us how we did. Should we keep going with new games? Should we do more Youtube videos? Podcasts? Blogs? Let us know what you think in the comments!

The Gamification of Starvation

After two games highlighting collaboration through competition, we decided it was time for some good old Player versus Environment (PvE) gameplay to round out the project. As we’ve learned in Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2, communication and strategy play an important role in a successful collaboration. In Don’t Starve Together (DST), however, these tenets are besieged by the horrors and nightmares of randomly generated environments rather than an enemy team. While this doesn’t necessarily change any of those core concepts, it does put an interesting twist on things.

Don’t Starve Together, Easier Said Than Done

http://dont-starve-game.wikia.com/wiki/Willow

When we decided to play Don’t Starve Together, I knew it would be my favorite. I love survival, crafting, and sim games. Don’t Starve Together has all these elements, plus the opportunity to play with friends. I’m addicted to Sims by Electronic Arts, but the one thing lacking is that my friends can’t come live in my town and interact with my Sims. While Don’t Starve Together has a very different gameplay, it does have a lot of my favorite elements of Sims like crafting and building with the added bonus of being cooperative. If you don’t already know the basics of Don’t Starve Together, check out the Wikia. The game is too weird for me to try and explain, so the following post may sound as though I lost my mind, if you are unfamiliar with the game’s quirkiness.

Don’t Starve Together, Delegate Together

Don’t Starve Together (DST) quickly emerges as a game demanding delegation to meet the challenges of feeding, protecting, and maintaining the sanity of the group.  It’s not easy.  We tried all kinds of group structures before we decided to split-up together.  That is, we determined that we would be best served and able to cover more ground by leaving the comfort of one and other and moving into the wild to forage resources alone.

Wrapping-up Team Fortress 2: Our Top Three Teaching Takeaways

Having spent some time with Team Fortress 2, we’ve been able to glean some interesting insight into how the game fosters its brand of collaboration using a complex, role-based system.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to see some pedagogical possibilities.  While it’s no mystery that games and classrooms alike often rely on role-based participation in order to accomplish group objectives, playing a game like Team Fortress 2 provides some top-tier pointers for potential curriculum creators.   Below you’ll find our top three tips when implementing role-based collaborative activities in your classroom.

A Lesson in Organic Collaboration

Unlike my partners, Alex and Kyle, I have played Team Fortress 2 before. If you’ve read my last blog, you already know I played the game when it first game out eight years ago; all the way back in 2007. I looked back on my time with TF2 fondly, and was excited to return to my old stomping grounds all these years later. The thing is, those old stomping grounds don’t exactly exist anymore.

The Blogcast 3: Collaboration Without Communication

---

Hello again internet, and welcome back to the final edition of The Blogcast. In this episode, we take a look back at our time with Team Fortress 2 and apply what we’ve learned to the classroom.

We’d love to hear about a collaborative experience you’ve had in a competitive multiplayer shooter. Tell us about it in the comments below or on our Facebook page.

Music Provided by Accelerated Ideas

Team Fortress 2: Set it Ablaze!

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Heavy

I’ve never played Team Fortress or Team Fortress 2 (TF2) before last week. I assumed I would only moderately enjoy it and that I would be terrible at it. Turns out, it was awesome and so was I. Now, let’s be honest, I didn’t break any records compared to other players. BUT I was strides better in TF2 than in Dota 2. In case you’re new like me, check out Scot’s blog post introducing TF2.

The Gamification of Annihilation: Classes in Team Fortress 2

Image courtesy of steamcommunity.com

Now that we’ve wrapped our coverage of Dota 2, it’s time to move on to a new game: Team Fortress 2 (TF2). The main issue we ran into working with Dota 2 is the level of complexity in the game. If this were a long-term project, or if we weren’t busy with so many other things, we could have dug deeper for elements of collaboration in high level play. There are so many intricacies in Dota, most of our study ended up focusing on the collaborative elements found in just learning how to play. This is why we decided to choose a game that is easier to learn, but still has collaboration baked into the core gameplay loop.