Teaching, Class, Games!

hey all,

I just realized that I've been at my current job for one year now. It doesn't seem like one year could have gone by already, but it has.

Work has been pretty stressful, but I think we're making some changes for the better. I'm going to try to design a reward scheme for good behavior/material mastery that will be game-like enough to motivate students to do well. For some students, it seems like I focused on punishing their bad behavior without motivating them to behave well (except in so far as not receiving punishment is a motivator). We started teaching my packet on biomes that I spent so much time on, and it seems to be going well so far.

I just got on to the new curriculum design course's website, and it focuses on assessment. So you "teach" something, and you want to see if your students actually learned it. So you ask them questions, have them take a test, write what they learned in their own words, connect it to something in their everyday lives, etc. These are all different ways of assessing your students. Of course, you can also assess your teaching, the presentation of the material, the sequence of teaching activities, etc. These are also part of assessment. Making sure that everything is coherent and congruent seems key.

Anyway, that stuff aside, I got my 3 games last weekend and it is safe to say that I'm a little crazy about games right now. I probably already put about 10-15 hours into Dark Souls. It is an amazing game, but I really hate this "spiritual successor" crap that everyone keeps bandying about in discussion and review of it. Dark Souls is supposed to be the "spiritual successor" to Demons Souls. Both games were developed by Japanese gaming company From Software.

Here are some key points about Demons Souls:

• hardcore difficulty
• "souls" harvested from monsters are used to level up, repair and improve weapons, buy items
• if you die, you lose all the souls in your possession, and to get them back, you must successfully fight your way back to where you died and touch your bloodstain
• precise combat
• weapons and armor degrade through use
• dark fantasy setting
• bosses must be defeated to open up new areas of play
• enemies regenerate after your death, or after resting at a key point
• online play is done via indirect summoning of human or NPC characters, or by invading other human players games
• other online interaction is indirect, done through ghostly images, leaving/reading/rating (un)helpful messages, etc

Each one of these is also true for Dark Souls. The graphics are better, the gameplay has been refined and honed, and improved (although I think they made the lock-on feature used during combat much stickier and more difficult to use), but a "spiritual successor" is supposed to make fundamental changes to the gameplay and story. OK, the "backstory" to Darks Souls is different from the backstory to Demons Souls, but let's not let that distract us from the fact that the gameplay structurally so similar that it feels more like a really good sequel, and not a "spiritual successor."

 I've also got Batman: Arkham City and Battlefield 3. The single player campaign for BF3 kinda sucks, but the online play is great. Batman is fun, but I've easily put 4-5 times as many hours into Dark Souls. Not to rag on either game, but the difficulty of Dark Souls actually makes it highly motivating. You feel like you've really done something after you defeat the flying gargoyles that trounced you the first 10 or 15 times.

In non-game related news, Michi and I went rock climbing last weekend, and I spent most of the day climbing 5.7-5.9's, which is about 3 or 4 grades below my normal max. I didn't want to push my finger too hard, and we'll be going again this weekend anyway. I did finally get up to 5.10a, but that is normally my starting/warm-up level and I go up from there. Oh well, it has been about 3 months.

Cheers,