Trade Day at #GenCon (Gaming and Education)

Trade Day at #GenCon (Gaming and Education) June 11, 2015

Gen Con will be taking place at the end of July, and this year I’ll be attending Trade Day, the day before the activities most gamers are interested in. That day includes a large number of sessions aimed at educators. I was quite astounded by the sheer number of them, so many overlapping sessions that one has to choose between many overlapping sessions that look interesting.

I don’t remember noticing so many such sessions being listed in previous years. Perhaps this is a sign that the relevance of gaming to education is becoming clearer to larger numbers of people? There have been a lot of articles about gaming and gamification in education lately. One thing that is significant is that gaming allows you to fail over and over again in the process of trying to beat a game. What might education look like if students were free to fail throughout the course, and what mattered was only how well they eventually met the challenge after trying – and failing – as many or as few times as they needed to on the way there?

Have any readers of this blog ever been to Trade Day at Gen Con? If so, what was your experience like? And which of you will be at Gen Con this year? If you’ll be there, please leave a comment to say so – perhaps we can have an Exploring Our Matrix gathering!

 


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