Upper School Faculty Conducts Workshops at International Games Conference
Hundreds of educators from around the globe flock to Madison, Wisconsin each summer for the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) conference hosted by the University of Wisconsin. Upper School faculty member Jeremiah McCall conducted a workshop on using Inform, a text-based programming langauge that is used to create Interactive Fiction with Country Day colleague and Academic Dean Greg Martin. He later spoke on "Serious Games," sharing his approach to teaching with games that promote understanding and analysis of important social (poverty, for example) and political (grassroots campaigning, for example) issues.
McCall was busy during other sessions meeting educators who were interested in the recent publication of his book Gaming the Past. McCall has been attending GLS conferences for over five years and was recently asked by GLS leadership to help form an organization that will promote game-based learning in K-12 institutions (GLS is primarily attended by professors in higher education and professionals in the game design world). Also in attendance was Country Day graduate Ellen Loudermilk who graduated first from Brown University and recently from Harvard University with a Masters from their Technology Innovative Education program. Loudermilk is entering the brugeoning field of games-in-education. Martin helped McCall run the Inform workshop and also presented on Inform in the poster session at the conference. Country Day was well-represented at GLS thanks to McCall's work.
