Games Workshop
Marcella Albaine, Solar History Teacher and author of the book ‘Ensino de História e Games – Dimensões Práticas em Sala de Aula’ (Teaching of History and Games – Practical Dimensions in Classroom), started a Games Workshop with Elementary School II students. Started in May, the meetings are weekly and lasts 1 hour and 30 minutes.
In the first meetings, they worked the concept of gamification and the possible learning through the games with an analysis of the news on the subject. Then, students thought about how they would teach the content of their projects through a game. They began to work on game creation platforms and now have built up historical scenarios in the Minecraft game, such as medieval castles, Egypt pyramids and the Nazi concentration camp.
Games Workshop idea came through the contact between the teacher and the students in classroom. Often, students would turn their attention to a game on the tablet when they should be paying attention in class. Because of that, Marcella began to analyze how she could use this in favor of History classes. Today, she works part of the programmatic content of her subject within the gaming workshop itself.
The book ‘Ensino de História e Games – Dimensões Práticas em Sala de Aula’ (Teaching of History and Games – Practical Dimensions in Classroom) was also written based on research done at Solar Integral School. The goal was to think of how games can be used in learning, since technologies have much to offer in terms of changing the logic of thinking and building knowledge in school spaces.
With the creation of this workshop and with projects pedagogy, among others, Solar Integral School thinks the School as a space of creation in its specificity, taking advantage of the subjects of interest of students and their better ways of learning and absorption of content.
