Matt Farber August 25, 2015

Game Jams: Excite Your Students While Teaching 21st Century Skills.

Game jams have been growing in popularity across college campuses and in out-of-school programs. In a game jam, teams are challenged to design a game in a short period of time. Often, there is a theme, like making a game about math or environmental problems. In essence, game jams are a game about making a game.

Students learn computational thinking, design engineering, systems thinking,

collaboration, planning, storyboarding, iterative development, while also learning how to tackle broad, open-ended problems.

Matthew Farber will discuss his use of game jams in his middle school social studies classes, as well as his digital game jams in the after school club he advises. He will share resources from the Moveable Game Jams he attended in the New York area this year, including Quest to Learn in New York City.

Matthew Farber teaches in Denville, NJ. He is an Edutopia blogger and cohost of Ed Got Game, on the BAM! Radio Network. He won a Geraldine R. Dodge Teacher Fellowship and he is a Woodrow Wilson HistoryQuest Fellowship. Farber is a NJ Council of the Social Studies Board Member, a Member-at-Large for the ISTE Games and Simulations Network, and an Advisor to Literary Safari. He holds a Master's Degree in EdTech from New Jersey City University, where he's an EdTech Leadership Doctoral Candidate. Look for his book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning, available at Amazon.