Did you miss the final session of the Co-designing games to teach Indigenous and rural history course? Just curious to know what the course is like?

We don’t do the exact same presentation every time and, of course, different cohorts have different participants and interests, which leads to different discussions.

Here for your viewing/ listening pleasure are all the videos from the last session with our very first cohort.

• Some instructor and cohort introductions, housekeeping issues – how to get graduate credit. If you need the syllabus or link for registration for credit, email – https://youtu.be/Kjr64yysGf0?si=ykZ-rTu3rksQtxg2 
• What’s in your final project? We discuss the requirements and present an example of a lesson where students research rural artifacts https://youtu.be/d_pswtTixno?si=k-KcX2kQeZ2bl_8v  
• Game design – Seeds of Sustainability Dr. Daniel Conn presents an example game design based on Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden and including traditional songs as primary sources. Zac King provides his perspective on non-Indigenous developers or game designers creating games around Indigenous culture and stories. https://youtu.be/-tenawyendM?si=ccoJn8bqcrZzyWzJ
• Lesson example – Dr. Dan Conn gives a lesson example for middle school using the Seeds of Sustainability game and learning about Hidatsa culture, specifically their agriculture along the Missouri River. Dr. Annmaria De Mars discusses choices in what should be in a lesson and what topics are appropriate for different grade levels. She doesn’t have definitive answers but she made some decisions about including positive stories and role models in the younger grades and putting off the more nuanced and complex histories until middle school at the earliest. https://youtu.be/MPeFFoWOXgw?si=AA_J47nE9bhWMDgq
• What happens next – course wrap up: Dr. Dan Conn talks about the importance of curriculum, how much we value your feedback. Dr. Annmaria De Mars shows an example of another game about saving seeds that was coincidentally done as part of a US – New Zealand game jam. She also discusses the fact that not everything is appropriate for a game and that just because your idea hasn’t made it into a game yet, doesn’t mean you won’t see it in the future. https://youtu.be/wo0Hpj60tkg?si=ov54nJBPthKo8AVE

What makes this game special?

First of all, your students may be the first kids in the world to play it! This was made as part of the Global Game Jam, an annual challenge in which developers make a game over a weekend. Yes, we started on Friday night and released the game on Sunday. 

 (Read to the end for a second feature that we hope you don’t notice.)

As well as our in-house game testers, we do have a focus group of actual kids who play our games but, being kids, they were busy this weekend with important things like Cub Scouts and meeting their new baby cousin. Since, as part of the game jam, we had to release the game on Sunday, we thought it might be fun for some classrooms to be the first kids in the world to play a game.

Lesson:

A fourth-grade Common Core standard is:

Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons and information.

Even if your state has not adopted Common Core, we are guessing that you teach something similar. In my experience, students are more motivated and excited about an assignment when it has a real world application.  

Here is one recommended assignment . Feel free to copy and modify it to suit your class.

Objective: We are going to be one of the first classes in the world to play a new game. Write an opinion piece about the video game “Follow the Bubbles.” Explain what you liked and didn’t like about the game and provide recommendations for improvement.

1. First, pass out the assignment in advance so students can be thinking about this as they play the game.
2. Have students play the game, Follow the Bubbles.
3. If you think it would be more motivating for your students to really send their opinions to the developers and get written feedback, you are welcome to email admin@7generationgames.com with their papers attached. You can even take pictures on your phone and text us at (310) 804-9553 and we will respond to your class. We won’t grade your papers (sorry) but we will send a response to each suggestion and let you know if we are working on it.

Content taught or reviewed in the game

The mathematics in Follow the Bubbles is multiplication of one-digit numbers, multiplication of two-digit numbers and division. In two mini-games (tic-tac-toe and caves and trees), they need to answer math problems to win. This is a review of mathematics students should already know, simply practice to retain information.

Social Studies content includes discussion of primary sources and examples of primary sources from the Lewis and Clark expedition. There are three hangman games where students need to guess a vocabulary word related to the expedition or primary sources.

What else makes this game special?

As we mentioned, we made this game over a weekend, but that’s not what’s special about it. We created it to be equally accessible to students who were visually impaired, hearing impaired or have a reading disability. To design the game, we worked with a teacher for visually impaired students who is herself blind. We started with what games her students could play. Then, we tested the entire game with a screen reader. For students who have a reading disability, we added a speaker icon to almost every page that reads the text in the voice of one of the characters. This feature can also be used by visually impaired students. For hearing impaired students, information and instruction on each page is given in text as well.

The First Workshop is Over but You Can Still Join Us

On August 2nd, Professors Juliana Taken Alive and Annmaria De Mars led an online workshop on an introduction to primary sources available from the Library of Congress, with educators from North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Colorado and California. You can see a rough draft of the game we designed here. We started with the introduction to what are primary sources and a module on Native American veterans of World War I.

You can play the game online here.

We will continue working on it during the workshop at Fort Yates in October.

That’s great but what if I missed the online workshop?

You’re not alone. Some of the educators who signed up had technical difficulty. We know how unreliable Internet can be in some places.

Sign up on this Google form

Not Sure? Check out the first workshop

You can see the play list with videos from the first workshop here.

Next workshop dates

• October 5, 2024 – Fort Yates, ND – 10 a.m. – 4 p.m. Lunch and mileage reimbursement provided. Lodging funded for those more than 60 miles from Fort Yates who have completed workshop one and assignments.
• December 9 – Online, 6-8 pm Central time

Educators who attend and complete the assignments – lessons you can use in your class because we are all about hands on and being practical – can receive one graduate or undergraduate credit from Sitting Bull College or Minot State University.

You keep mentioning assignments. What are those assignments?

After you have completed workshop one, either the Zoom meeting or the recorded version, you need to complete the following assignments:

• Visit getting started with primary sources
• Sign up for Teaching with Primary Sources Teachers network
  • Visit free to use and reuse sets and post review of one set to TPS network. Email link of your post to the instructor.

We’ll send you more information on the assignments for the remaining two workshops when we receive your sign-up form.

We’re very excited to announce that 7 Generation Games has received a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary sources program. We will work with educators to create games and lessons teaching Indigenous and rural history using primary sources. Of course, if these lessons included math or science, we would be thrilled. Educators will work with facilitators, Professors Annmaria De Mars, Juliana Taken Alive and Dan Conn in a series of three workshops, two create game designs and lessons using those games.

Games will then be created by 7 Generation Games. Participants receive credit from Sitting Bull College.

Image is Tex Northrup, a Paiute rancher, from Library of Congress collection

The first cohort will give priority to teachers from North and South Dakota and kicks off with an online meeting August 2nd – Did you miss the August 2nd session? You can still sign up. Learn about upcoming sessions and how you can get involved here.

For more information, and to apply, see the post Co-designing Games to Teach with Primary Sources from Indigenous and Rural History or just

Go to the application form to sign up.

At 7 Generation Games, we always like sharing resources that we love. This week we’d like to share a site we love, which is the Minnesota Agriculture in the Classroom site.

At first glance, it may not appear there is much here, but appearances are deceiving.

Virtual Field Trips Plus

Take the virtual field trips, for example. When we last checked the site there were 30 videos. You can sign up for a live virtual field trip during the school year or view the videos on YouTube afterward. Most of the videos have Curriculum Connections, like this one on a Mushroom Farm.

Resources with the Mushroom Farm video include:

• Parts of a mushroom worksheet
• Mushroom life cycle worksheet
• An experiment growing mold that uses nothing more than a piece of bread and a Ziploc bag
• Writing assignments at both the upper elementary and middle school level

Agriculture and Language Arts

Maybe every state has this? If you know, let me know because after reading this I am now motivated to visit every state’s Ag in the Classroom site.

Agriculture Terms Glossary – from aquatic to turf, it’s all here. One of my favorite creative writing activities as a student was when teachers would give us a dozen or so words that had to be included in a story or essay we wrote. This glossary can be used in that same way for a writing prompt.

Minnesota Ag Mag

There are SIX different magazines available, for grades K, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5-6. Minnesota teachers can order the print version for free. Anyone can access the magazine online.

Lessons and Recipes

Under the MN Harvest of the Month program section, you can find many K-12 lessons and recipes to use in the classroom.

The MN Ag in Classroom site provides many different resources and support to educators and that’s why it’s one of the sites we love.

When we created the beta version of Making Camp Navajo, we were in the middle of a pandemic. Schools wanted more advanced content and we had a game designer and community manager from the Navajo Nation who was able to connect us with some additional cultural experts, so it was a natural next game for us to do.

Like any beta version, it was okay. All of the math instructional content was correct, we had a unit of lessons on ratio and proportion that included playing the game. Still, like any beta version, there were aspects that could be better. We’ve spent lots of time in classrooms ourselves, and we understand that when students can’t work independently, it’s frustrating for them and takes time away from the teacher.

Changes to Make Students’ (and, hence, Teachers’) Lives Easier

TL; DR – we made it a lot less likely that students would need to call over the teacher for help.

1. Any equivalent ratio is now scored correct. and extra spaces are ignored. The blue corn mush math problems were too easy to get wrong. For one of the problems, if a student answered 2:10 instead of 1:5, it was scored incorrect. Those are equivalent. Also, if a student entered spaces like 1 : 5 it was scored wrong. Why would someone enter it like that? As with many things people do, I have no idea, but I do know it ends with the student calling over the teacher and asking why their answer is wrong.
2. The default screen size now fits on the smallest Chromebooks. The original screen size was a little bigger than the smallest Chromebooks, which meant the next arrow could be off the screen and the student wouldn’t see it. This resulted in them calling the teacher over who either told the student to scroll down or to zoom out and view the game at 90%.

3. We added LOADS of hints. Every page now has a header with a ? in a button the top right. Clicking on that button will give you a hint on how to solve the problem, whether it is instructions to click the colored “brush” on the right and then click the square on the “rug”, an equation to use to solve a problem for milk replacer ratio or to click the corn borers to squash them.
4. The question applying the ratio of water to milk replacer has a random number of lambs, so it isn’t always the same problem.
5. A hundred little changes that add up – whether it was the title not quite centered, adding wiggly corn borers to pages where these pests are discussed or an extra few pixels of padding around the score box, players don’t notice these changes individually, but they come together to make a game look more professional, and more like something students want to play.

You can learn more about Making Camp Navajo here – or just go here to play the game.

Creating opportunities through breaking down barriers in educational game development

We started 7 Generation Games because we believed kids deserved better. We built better learning games and got better results: better academic outcomes, better engagement and better representation (both games and classroom curriculum). Over time, our mission has stayed the same, but the way we’re approaching that has evolved, or – to use a gaming term – leveled up.

A selection of the games we’ve made.

As of this blog, we’ve made 34 games – with five more in the works – collaborating with more than two dozen partners (from tribal nations to nonprofits to publishers), creating games for students who too many other game companies fail to serve, from English-language learners to rural communities to Indigenous youth. By the end of the year, we expect that total number of games to be at or approaching 50. In doing so, we’ve served hundreds of thousands of kids.

That’s a lot of apps and a lot of kids. To put that in perspective, it’s the equivalent of developing two tablet screens’ worth of games and serving three to four NFL stadiums’ worth of kids.

In the process, we built our own educational game development platform to streamline production and keep down costs.

But even then, we knew that we alone could not create games reflective of every community. Being able to create more games is important because no single game can effectively address educational outcomes across diverse populations. As much as people want to claim that their learning app or tool or software is the magic solution to all struggles for all students in education, there is no universal fix.

Last fall, we rolled out a low-code version of that platform for organizations to try to make educational game development more accessible. We adapted our platform to enable publishers, non-profits, tribes to create educational games using blocks of code that could be edited and virtually snapped together, reducing obstacles to game development by making it possible for entry-level programmers to create quality games.

7 Gen Blocks Low-Code Platform

However, we realized that to truly be accessible we needed to take our work a step further. We needed to make it possible for anyone who wanted to create educational games regardless of programming ability to be able to do so.

7 Gen Blocks EDU is that tool.

It’s a no-code version of our 7 Gen Blocks platform that integrates the best practices we’ve learned (around gaming and digital instruction), enabling educational content to be turned into games, customizable to different cultures, languages and student realities, without needing to code.

7 Gen Blocks EDU No-Code Tool

By building an easy-to-use development platform that doesn’t require coding skills, we’re not simply creating games that reflect communities, we’re empowering communities to control their own narratives and create their own games. 

That representation and reflection matters. We at 7 Generation Games know it because we have lived it.

One of the things that I am most proud of when I look back at what we’ve built at 7 Generation Games is not the games we’ve created (although those are awesome), but the opportunities – and not just for the students who play them.

I look at the team we currently have. I think about the number of talented young professionals we’ve been able to help launch their careers as their first job or internship and proudly watch them go on to organizations from NASA’s JPL to Unity to LinkedIn. Throughout the course of our company history, our staff has always been overwhelming (70-80 percent) Black, Indigenous or Latino. More often than not, our team members have been first-generation college students and/or English-language learners. So when we talk about creating for historically marginalized communities, we’re not building for “those” communities, we are building for OUR communities.

Some of our amazing team, past and present

We are testaments to the transformative impact STEM education has had on our lives, and it shapes the work we do.

I believe it is our responsibility not merely to leave the ladder down for the next generation, but to build them stairs.

I’m under no illusions that 7 Gen Blocks EDU is that full staircase, but I do believe it’s another step in making that happen.

7 Gen Blocks EDU is currently in the MVP stage (that’s the technical terms for a functional, but not polished draft form). We expect to move it into beta this summer and hope to have public-facing version of the platform available by the end of this year.