This is an interactive website based on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books/games. The characters of Harry Potter have been thrown into The Hunger Games (as tributes or mentors) by Lord Voldemort. The player chooses one of the characters and must read each passage, then makes a decision for that character, which could result in becoming the Victor...or "Reenervate" to try again.
If you have students who like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, they will have fun on this website. New characters are unlocked daily & we plan on writing more stories - one with the characters rebelling against Lord Voldemort and breaking out of the arena.
It is great practice for reading skills - some characters have longer passages, some shorter. Some have up to 144 different scenarios (that's 144 pages of text). The least amount of reading for a player is 19 pages. So think about your low readers - that may be more than they read in a week by just playing one character.
The writers who have/are contributing to this non-profit project include teachers, high school students, college students, professional writers, graphic artists, musicians, librarians, and so many more. We're all fans of both series, of course. :)
(For grades 7 and up)
I have a free download of lesson ideas for using The Potter Games in your classroom here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Potter-Games-Using-Interactive-Fiction-to-Improve-Reading
Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print.
Read them like books, play them like games, and send them like greeting cards. They’re curiously fun.
Problems with CC media literacy standards:
" focus marginalizes uses of a range of other media/digital literacies associated with social-networking sites, blogs, wikis, digital images/videos, smartphone/tablet apps, video games, podcasts, etc., for constructing media content, building social networks, engaging audiences, and critiquing status quo problems.And, other than a mention of the need to "evaluate information from multiple oral, visual, or multimodal sources," there is no specific reference in the common standards to critical analysis and production of film, television, advertising, radio, news, music, popular culture, video games, media remixes, and so on. Nor is there explicit attention on fostering critical analysis of media messages and representations."
also--they ask why there are not more erudite games, just as there is "classic" literature--I think games are still a new art form. And aren't there are many fluff books as there are fluff or violent games
More important than that historic ruling is the reminder by a U.S. Supreme Court Justice that video games, like books, plays and movies, communicate ideas.
Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat," Scalia wrote. "But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional."
It raises the question, what video games live up to that legacy of great literary works? And why aren't there more of them?
Now that this distraction is out of the way, lets see the creation of more games like Bioshock, like Shadow of the Colossus, like Flower, games that make you think, that explore new ideas, that shake up preconceived notions.
My students told me about this site where they make study guides and flash cards for themselves. It's free, and it would be particularly good for studying information that you have to memorize.
Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.
On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”
is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
I'm on page 199 of 349 of Let the Great World Spin: "there's a high that you get when you're writing code. It's cool. It's easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You've got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere, Its about begin connected, access, gateways, like a whispering games where if you get one thing wrong you've got to go all the way back to the beginning."
quote from a teen hacker in the novel--it captures adolescence, hacking, learning, delight, beauty, everything: I want to remember this when I meet my new students in September