NECC - Monday 6/30, part 4

Game and Simulation Developers K-12 and the Future of Learning

I forgot to mention the gaming Birds-of-a-Feather session I attended Monday afternoon. These are sessions that are supposed to be more of a discussion than lecture. They're moderated by an expert and people just bring up topics in a discussion format. I was in a different situation than others, many of them were teaching gaming in their own courses or extra-curriculars. I am teaching Scratch with game design as a minor subset of programming. I found some interesting ideas for programs and systems for game design, a few resources from other teachers.

Two things annoyed me about it.

1. The fact that they put it in the main hallway of the conference center as everyone, their mothers and second cousins walked by. Kinda tough to ask the crowd of three hundred to keep it down.
2. The smug jackass from the University of North Texas. I found him condescending, always referring to inside jokes between he and the moderator that others wouldn't have known. His response to a question of mine was more belittling than helpful. Fantastic pedagogy, that's why you're in higher ed, not K-12.