Depending on how your planning shakes out, you might find yourself with a few extra minutes in your educational spaces… or an extra week to fill with activities! In the spirit of finding engaging and playful learning for any amount of time, we’re going to explore some ideas that can be up and running in seconds all the way to a multi-day process that fit in any subject, space, or scenario. Check it out!
Five Minutes – Connect Ideas and Terms to Imagery
We’ve all been there – you’re out of ways to review key words, topics, characters, or concepts in your library or classroom. Using our custom visual dice found in Gamestormers and our 139 unique cards with their own original art, you can have participants take the visuals and use them to connect to the topics they are learning about. Our free playful assessment lesson plan walks you through how to have learners roll the dice and pull a few random cards from the Gamestormers deck and then practice using them in tandem with those vocabulary terms. Fun and quick all at once!
Fifty Minutes – Create Custom Concept Cards
What’s even better than connecting ideas and terms to visuals? How about making your own game cards that help show the relationships between ideas and concepts? With our free custom card templates for both Google Slides/PowerPoint and Canva, students can become game designers in a matter of minutes, creating a collection of cards with powers that showcase their real-world counterparts and demonstrate the interactions between concepts as well.
If you are focusing on conveying the perspectives of real or fictional characters, we also have fully customizable “Post” cards from our social media card game, Doomscroll. Much like our concept card templates, we have free social media post card creator templates in both Google Slides and Canva for participants to use to make their real or imagined characters come to life.
Five Hours – Retheme an Existing Game
So you’ve got a class period a day for a week, or maybe five hours spread across a few weeks at your disposal… now what? How about this – students take an existing game they know and retheme the game around a topic they are interested in or learning about currently! With our free Designer Workbook, students and educators can easily go from zero game design skills to remixing and retheming games to feature new mechanics and new assets in no time! Simply follow the workbook’s process to build out a digital or physical game prototype.
Five Days – Design a Game About Your Subject
As much fun as it is to take an existing game and make it your own… what about creating an entirely original game about a topic? With our free 15-lesson GamestormEDU Course, you can take around 3 hours each day to engage in a full game design curriculum and come out the other side with a fully-functional game that is playtested and tweaked by your participants, each of whom will officially become game designers. The lessons come with step-by-step directions and videos that support the skill development at each phase.
There you have it! Whether you have five minutes or five days, there are TONS of free options to get your learners creating and playfully learning – go make some memories in your library or classroom today!