Buckminster Fuller’s World Game

• I’ve read about this and have a poster of Spaceship Earth (Dymaxion Map), but I’ve never seen the game played. I’m just in awe of the people who do mock governments and model UNs with tons of kids. I’d like to participate in one of those myself, now. The topics here remind me of iCivics games, which aren't group simulations, but work really well for content because of the clear instructions, careful path led through the material, and the game feedback system. The kids feel smart when they play these.

Farts and Burps

• I am 100% positive I can build a year’s science unit using burps and farts as our base topic: nutrition, digestion, psychology of food; chemistry; physics of how the body experiences energy, plus gravity, density, and how fast a fart would rise in the sky given certain weather patterns.

• How ripe is this idea for physical AND pencil games, huh? Also, I’ve used many Phet simulations, which are very clear and helpful, especially the one on digestion, which, with the sound effects, was a huge hit.

Sports Balls

• I wrote this for my Tiorati summative paper: bring in a huge number of sports balls: tennis, baseball, softball, wiffle ball, football, basketball, lacrosse, volleyball, soccer, racquetball, field hockey, anything.

• The question is: Why are they different? Why do we need this many different types of balls?

• What about them is different? How are they used differently? On what surfaces? Do they fly through the air? Will you get hurt if it hits you? and whatever they can think of.

• This is a science investigation project. Can this be a game, too? I’m sure it can. It would also be nice to say the word balls so many times that it ceases to be funny. That saves all your classes. :-)

National Parks

• I know there are national park games out there. I do. About the real national parks.

• I’d like to focus on a game that has the kids examine an aspect of the parks—geology, ecology, politics—so they can create a national park of an area they know of or can imagine.

• Maybe they draw cards to determine characteristics of the area: a card for terrain: flat, rolling, foothills, mountains; one for flora: lush, healthy, limited, barren.

• I’d kind of like them to be proud of their own community, though, and argue for a park there, which would eliminate the randomness. Needs more thought. (Maybe they can trade cards and some will try to build their own area and some will try to build other stuff, like Area 51 or something. Your goal would be to get the cards that represent your dream area, which could include here where we are now.) Ah! Is this a cooperative game! Yes!

20,000 Leagues

• I met a teacher in LA who was using the book as the foundation for everything her fifth grade did that year.

• She would read part of the book aloud, then the kids would discuss which parts grabbed them, provoked more questions, and they would study some aspect of the book for a while: fish and other sea life, ocean chemistry, geography, governments, whatever.

• I once wrote a college paper about how to use the book to link to information sites on the internet (“What is a maelstrom? Click here.”)

• How can this become a game? How can it be used for lots of different aspects of content? Is it a family of games for different sections of the book or different parts of the world? Or is it more like the Adolescent’s Day or National Parks ideas, with cards and dice determining situations that the characters can react to? (Are they the characters in the book, or extra passengers, or an omniscient god over the whole world?)

Robinson Crusoe

• Similar to the 20,000 Leagues idea, to build a game around the experiences of the
  shipwrecked genius: world oceans, storms, flora and fauna, physical science, and,
  perhaps, international relations. . . .

• I've had this book, Robinson Crusoe: My Journals and Sketchbooks, since I was a kid
  and am fascinated by all the things he could do by himself.

• I'd really like to teach all this somehow, but hesitate to make a story-based 
  game on someone else's story.

Water

• I’ve already taught a year of water, which was great. We got to do ecology, chemistry, and physics with just water. We used a lot of material from Middle School Chemistry and from Lawrence Hall of Science GEMS, plus Living in Water, by the National Aquarium, 1997.

• I’ve thought of a simple game to teach adhesion and cohesion: Use those sticky-stretchy blobs (like from Oriental Trading) as water molecules in a pond and have one stick to the root of a plant and another stick to the first. Maybe they only stick properly at that 105 degree angle (magnets?). Cooperatively, the kids have to get the water molecules up to the flower at the top of the plant. Maybe a physical standing board of a marsh plant. Pair with actual carnations and celery in food coloring.

Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me

• a way to use the games from the show in content areas

• it would be so time-consuming to write, especially limericks and Fake the Listener

• It would be equally time-consuming to administer in class.

• But these are awesome games.

Reviving the City Game

• I’d like to get my cardboard copy out of the front porch and try to make it work

Moon

• I like the idea of the kids building with random factors, like using cards. Maybe they build a Sun-Moon-Earth system using attributes on the cards.

• Would their system need to be the same as ours to learn those characteristics? Or can they use rules to build one like ours: gravitation pull, mass, proximity, etc.

• Even if we make one that is fictional (oooh, Tatooine! Yeah, and why is Hoth cold all the time? Is it the distance to their star?), I’d still like to make one about our own Moon. And if it’s about the Earth’s moon it would take 29 rounds to complete!