Proving there's more than one way to teach geopolitics to a class of ninth-graders, Eric Nelson, a social studies teacher at North Lakes Academy in Forest Lake, created a fantasy football-style game that has his students "drafting" countries - whose conditions they monitor on a weekly basis - and competing head-to-head.
The early results have been promising, Nelson says, as his students are more engaged and their analytical skills have improved. The game, called Fantasy Geopolitics, has also been featured on CNN.com and Mashable, a leading digital culture blog. Its scoring system is simple enough: points are awarded based on the number of times a country is mentioned in media outlets like the New York Times. This is where a basic knowledge of current affairs comes in handy — for example, stories mentioning Russia have spiked in recent weeks with the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
On the game's Kickstarter page, Nelson says:
Although the so-called gamification of education has gained wide attention in education circles, Nelson admits its efficacy in the classroom is largely anecdotal for now.
In 2003, University of Toronto researchers published a report, titled "A Practitioner's Guide To Gamification Of Education" that sought to "define gamification, deconstruct the process of gamifying a learning program, explore the limitations, and review successful implementations of gamification."
The report says:
Nelson, who lives in Minneapolis with his wife, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin, and then went to the University of Minnesota where he earned a master's in social studies education.
