Category Archives: Games

World Wide Maze

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Want to motivate and engage your students? Try using the World Wide Maze! Google’s latest experiment turns your favorite web page into a marble maze! The idea is to link your smartphone to a desktop but my keen eyed  students spotted the tiny blue link that allows you to play with PC only and use the arrow keys to maneuver the silver “pinball” around the maze! This morning I had everyone turn CNN into a World Wide Maze! They were able to navigate their “pinball” through the top news stories of the day! After 10 minutes of engaging play, we did a close reading of a featured article. The results were amazing! Try this!

Here is how to get a started:

  • Log into the Chrome browser
  • Access World Wide Maze: http://chrome.com/maze/
  • Click the Start button
  • Skip intro
  • This is the most difficult part….. in tiny blue letter under all the possible ways you can log in you will see : No smartphone? Play with PC only
  • Click on No smartphone? Play with PC only
  • A search box will appear
  • Add the URL you would like the students to visit.. in my case it was CNN.com
  • Select from the populated results
  • Play the game!

Teach & Learn Social Studies

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The following list was brought to you by Classroom Aid.

PlayingHistory – This site aggregates info. on history games, interactives and simulations resources in a simple, searchable database making it easy to find, rate, and review historical games. There are currently 126 shared games.

The Jamestown Online Adventure Game – In this alternative history game students chose different strategies for the Jamestown pioneers. The students become the Captain of the Jamestown Colony, they will find if they can do better than the real colony? The Jamestown Online Adventure Game does a nice job helping students develop a sense of both what happened and why it happened. From the same site “History Globe”, there are Oregon Trail Virtual Tour and Anglo-Apache Conflicts with interactive maps and related documnets.

Ben’s Guide to U.S. Governments is a cute website that use Benjamin Franklin’s avatar to introduce U.S. government, it is divided into K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12 grade levels and teacher & parent resources.

The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands has civics videos and online books, and Sunnylands Civics Games. The interactive games are about learning the Constitution. They are for for middle school or lower high school levels.

Budget Hero is a “serious” game that would help the public better understand the complicated federal budget process while also increasing awareness of the social and fiscal impact of the government policies currently under discussion during the election year. It is a database-driven online game that allows users to explore the pros, cons and social impact of over 100 policies.

Flags of the World asks students to match flags to their respective countries. After matching each flag to its country students can click the “learn more” link to find more information about that country.

iCivics Game – learning about citizenship, laws and democracy, with resources for teachers, highly recommended!

Planet Oranges – learning about managing money, with resources for teachers

Mission US – Two very sweet educational video games that doesn’t feel educational. Designed for middle school US history but it can be used in grades 5-12.

MSNBC offers a gallery of online games related to the news called the NewsWare Arcade, for you to stay informed just by having fun.

Think About History is a fun trivia game on History.com. The object of the game is to cross the playing board by correctly answering a sequence of history trivia questions. The questions on “Think About History” are a mix of simulation-based and text-based questions. The game can be played as an individual game or a two player game.

BBC History Game – BBC offers several interactive activities that can be used with interactive whiteboards. This Famous People history game is a great way to teach elementary children about historical figures.

Kids Past offers an easy-to-read World History “textbook” for kids and five history games to which students can apply the knowledge they gather from the textbook.

Fling the Teacher is a website containing 68 history quiz games. All of the quizzes have at least fifteen questions and a few of the games have more than 100 questions. The average is 30-45 questions per quiz.

SimCEO is an entirely online simulation where participants create companies, research each other’s companies online, buy/sell other company’s shares and reacting to daily news posting that can affect the market.

Typing Skills

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Flash required – more info and games here 
Bubbles Copyright TypingMaster 2013. More typing games available here.

I was working with a teacher this weekend and realized that many of our students are already great texters, but in order to be successful, they also need keyboarding skills.

 

Perfecting their typing skills will allow them to easily communicate information through emails, blogs and various other communication forms. Here are several links to assist them with perfecting their typing skills. If you know any other free typing sites, please let me know about them and I will add them to our list.

 

Vocabulary: 21st Century Style

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 Wordia is a free games-based learning platform – built on the foundations of a dictionary – that blends word-based learning games with interactive video vocabulary. Wordia encourages students to learn through play – building subject ‘Word Banks’ as they compete with classmates and other schools in a fun, competition-led, learning environment. The Wordia team is building a way for educators to measure a student’s progress and performance through games-based learning. Add Wordia to your “Activity List, ” Give it a try!

 

A Google A Day

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My goal this school year is to provide the Google A Day daily search puzzle to students which will allow them to fiddle with and test their search skills.

Each day there is a new question, with hints and a complete search solution path. You are even able to go back to the previous days if you missed checking in on A Google A Day.

A Google A Day is a fantastic resource for teachers to use in their classrooms when teaching research skills or critical thinking. It’s also a great way to get students engaged as they enter the classroom and prepare to focus on your class time.
Recently, Google made a short video showing how you can use

A Google A Day in your classroom. Watch the video below and learn some fun ways to use the site to get students interested in how to do research on any of the broad range of skills that we support.

Game Star Mechanics

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Gamestar Mechanic is a game and online community that teaches kids how to design their own games!
Designing games builds:
•Systems Thinking,
•21st Century Skills,
•Creative Problem Solving,
•Art and Aesthetics,
•Writing and Storytelling and creates a motivation for STEM learning.