“Students spent five weeks of the summer playing video games and then showed up at Monday’s Board of Education meeting to boast about it. The video games were part of a math and science camp attended by 120 seventh- and eighth-graders this summer. New Haven Public Schools partnered with Catalysts Powering Educational Performance to host and double the size of the camp from last year’s batch of 60 students. CPEP is a nonprofit organization committed to helping low-income students reach their full potential in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to the organization’s mission statement.”
This web-based game from Rice University was submitted by Lynn Lauterbach. The game is available at medmyst.rice.edu.
Subject Area and Learning Outcomes
Life Science Middle Level: Pathogens, Immune System, Disease, Bacteria, Viruses, Protozoan, Zoonotic Diseases, Scientific Method, STEM careers
(1-2 players) MedMyst Original has five different mission options. It is generally geared for teaching about infectious disease, pathogens, and the immune response. Mission 1 is an orientation or general introduction, Mission 2 is based on a bacterial disease, cholera, Mission 3 is a viral disease in the pox family, Mission 4 is a protozoan disease dealing with malaria. Mission 5 is a combination of things and is built around zoonotic (animal borne) illnesses. MedMyst Reloaded has STEM career connections and scientific method modeling. Games are built in to the program as reinforcement and review of content.
There are teacher materials, vocabulary, and activites included.
Rules of Play
Self-guided. Winning is not the object as much as completion.
The student is engaged in the text through a story line that is set in the future. They move through the program solving, learning, and reviewing materials dealing with Life Science concepts.
How this game works in class
I prefer to have students work individually although they can work in pairs. I like to put headphones on the students so the background music and other noises are what they hear. They work through at their own pace. I sometimes have them show accountability with some of the items under the teacher materials pages.
The teacher materials pages have activities and assessments included. The vocabulary pages guide students learning new words and their meanings.
Sixty-five students entering 6th grade this year at the New Roads Middle School in Santa Monica, California are experiencing a gamified education program sponsored by GameDesk. With funding from AT&T, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Motorola, Samsung, and others, PlayMaker is a program that not only uses games as instructional tools, it also gamifies the greater school experience.