Warlords of Japan

This is going to be the trickiest project to post about because it's based on a simulation that's copyrighted, called Warlords of Japan. We used this simulation as a starting point for ours, but made some considerable additions and changes. After all, this simulation was published in 1991, and pedagogy has changed quite a bit since then (there were a lot of regurgitation-type activities in it). The...

Build a Better Board Game: Spanish & Aztec Style

After we did a teacher-created game for our Renaissance case study, we decided to put the game design into the hands of our students for the Aztec and Spanish study. The Aztec and Spanish case study looks at what happens when two worldviews with very different technology, disease, and worldviews collide. In essence, the Aztecs, though they had a dominant empire in the Americas, were slaughtered and...

Boca al Lupo: A Game to Learn Historical Significance and the Renaissance

Boca al Lupo Italian, "from the mouth of the wolf" An expression, often used in theatre, to wish someone good luck. When it came time for us to begin our first major case study about worldviews, a look at how ideas spread during the Italian Renaissance, and how a Western worldview emerged, we were totally stuck. We looked at things other people had created, and projects we'd done in the past. One...

Me: A User Manual

We started our year in our grade 8 Humanities classes with a design challenge, with a couple of purposes: First, to help us learn about each other, and secondly, to set students up for success in the kind of collaborative work we knew we'd be doing all year. Enter, Me: A User Manual. The idea was for students to create a manual that would help other students know how to best collaborate with them. I...

A Personal Manifesto Final Project

I find it tricky to carve the time and the will to blog during the regular school year, which often amounts to several posts recapping the projects from the year during the summer. This is both good and bad - I often forget details when telling the story of something from long ago, but it also gives me the time and space to be truly reflective. For the best of both worlds, I think I'll start at the...