Originally posted by PlayMaker School at New Roads and the Center For Effective Learning

Throughout the year, we addressed engagement as we explored ancient civilizations through a series of authentic experiences where kids role-played, collaborated, negotiated, created rules, and navigated toward individualized and team goals.  Content became valuable as it was useful to students in completing tasks and achieving these goals.  Here is just a glimpse of their feedback about our last exploration in Mesoamerica:

“This was the best out of them all!!!.  I think that I put so much more work into MesoAmerica.  This really put a lot more into my head and I was really cooperating and really being there for my team.  For example, I had a vision of a great priest costume and had my grandma help me bring it to life.  It was one of the coolest things I have ever done!”

“As a priest, I felt that I had a very important role in the game. I had to do a lot of research for my group such as translating English to Nahualt and finding facts about ancient rituals and sacrifices.”

“The whole process taught me a lot. You have to know what you’re doing, put effort into your work, and don’t procrastinate. If you do, your whole experience will be bad. Once you put effort into what you’re doing, it actually becomes really fun, because if you’re just slacking off, you’re not doing or learning anything.”

“First of all I, want to say that I LOVED this experience. It was my absolute favorite game ( out of Survive and Thrive, Greece and MesoAmerica ). I loved how, in the game, you got to “apply ” for the role/job that you wanted and make a speech about why you should get the job and what you would do in that role.  I also feel that when I got  the role that I wanted it was a better experience. Not just by having more fun but really digging into information when I was cooking. For example when I made the cacao tamales I learned that the Aztecs didn’t have sugar, so for a sweetener, I used agave nectar.”

“I thought that this way of learning about Mesoamerica is amazing.”

“The “Mesoamerican” experience was very interesting and I am so happy that I was able to enjoy it. Being here for of all of the games with Playmaker and everything that we did this year in sixth grade has been an awesome learning experience.”

“This Mesoamerican experience was probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in school.  Not only because it was fun, but it combined learning, fun, and responsibility all into one game.  Through the ritual, trading session, flowery war and feast, I learned a lot.”