BrainPop offers a variety of activities for students to work together in pairs or groups on any device. To implement critical thinking in a lesson, teachers can use games, concept mapping, videos, and quizzes. One of the many aspects of Brainpop is that it provides resources for any subject, grade, or skill level. The educator section for teachers offers activities and lesson plan ideas that align with Common Core, national, and state standards. For example, BrainPop provides a detailed lesson plan for the Quandary Game (https://educators.brainpop.com/lesson-plan/quandary-problem-solving/?bp-topic=critical-reasoning). During the various episodes of the game, students use their problem-solving skills to assess issues and find solutions for each challenge. Through critical thinking, students learn how to put themselves in another's shoes by viewing a situation from a character's point of view.
(Please note the link to a Free Demo download on the right hand side of the linked page)
Orwell is an episodic indie game that puts players in the role of an analyst working for a fictional surveillance state in the wake of a bomb explosion in a public square. Players are tasked with scouring news sites, social networking sites, message boards, blogs, text chats, and the like for clues as to the identity of the bomber and possible motivations for the bombing. Potentially relevant information is highlighted, but it is up to the player to decide whether each piece of information is worthy of inclusion in a report to be passed up the chain of command. The items selected create the narrative that law enforcement will act upon, but the player has no say as to what actions are taken beyond selecting what to include in the accumulated data. The story unfolds through the narrative that player-selected data constructs and the actions that result. Mistakes can result in the detention or prosecution of innocents. This forces the player to exercise research and critical thinking skills, particularly evaluating data as relevant or irrelevant, reading between the lines, and maintaining awareness of how each piece of information contributes to an overall narrative. Embedded in all of this is a clever critique of the surveillance apparatus and how it relates to our conceptions of freedom, safety, and privacy-a critique, I would argue, worthy of the game's name.
I selected Orwell for this critical thinking post because it is essentially a gamified exercise in research, or, put another way, research with training-wheels. All of the pieces of data that the user can include are presented in context, and players must evaluate how a clue relates to both its context and to the investigation as a whole in order to make useful selections. That kind of consideration is essentially what we are doing as we research material for inclusion in an academic paper, and so I believe the game doe
"StudySync is a powerful digital literacy curriculum designed to advance reading, writing, critical thinking, speaking and listening skills, with optional print support for districts in transition"
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Prodigy is a strategic math game that helps develop critical thinking, decision making, and math skills for younger students.
Spent is an interactive game created by McKinney that challenges you to think critically in order to manage your money, raise a child and make it through the month getting paid minimum wage after a stretch of unemployment.
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