This seems very cool:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I started teaching, the average ninth grader looked like a zombie in class,\u201d Nelson toldMashable. \u201cOne night when I was lesson planning, I took a break and literally checked my Fantasy Football team and I had this realization that I was learning a lot about the\u00a0NFL\u00a0\u2014 things about football and the NFL I wouldn’t have otherwise learned.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The next day Nelson proposed the idea to the class. At first, the idea was met with skepticism, mostly due to the students\u2019 lack of familiarity with how Fantasy Football works. But after the students became familiar with the format of the game, they warmed up toFantasy Geopolitics\u00a0\u2014 both as a game, and as a new way to learn.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cMy students started asking to do more with [the game]. They wanted to make trades, form alliances and so I just started listening,” says Nelson. “Whatever they wanted to do to control their own learning experience, I did it. Now, they playfully trash talk about their countries and become fans of those countries, which spurs them to want to learn more. It\u2019s almost like they are trash talking each other into learning more.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“I’m ‘gamifying’ learning. I’m ‘gamifying’ news to get them over the hump and not see reading the news as some difficult task.”<\/em><\/p>\n

As for the format of the game,\u00a0Fantasy Geopolitics\u00a0is simple. It starts with a draft session, during which students select a team of three countries (the\u00a0U.S.\u00a0and\u00a0China\u00a0are banned due to their domination of the news) and then the players track stories about those countries in the news.<\/em><\/p>\n

Using the\u00a0Times Developer Network API, provided by\u00a0The New York Times\u2019, Nelson created a website that tracks how many times a country is mentioned in the news, and students get one point for every mention.<\/em><\/p>\n

Full Story Here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This seems very cool: \u201cWhen I started teaching, the average ninth grader looked like a zombie in class,\u201d Nelson toldMashable. \u201cOne night when I was lesson planning, I took a break and literally checked my Fantasy Football team and I had this realization that I was learning a lot about the\u00a0NFL\u00a0\u2014 things about football and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[197,631,547],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2442"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2442"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2443,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2442\/revisions\/2443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raypastore.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}