LIBRARIES AND COMMUNITY CENTERS USE GAMES TO INSPIRE YOUTH TO TAKE ACTION

Report Finds Program Effectively Trains Educators To Teach Game Design

Selen Turkay, a doctoral student in the Instructional Technology and Media program at Teachers College, Columbia University, recently prepared an independent evaluation of Global Kids’ Playing For Keeps Capacity Building Program, which trains educators to combine games and social issues in their work with youth.

The findings, based on 45 interviews with educators from the New York public libraries and Boston-area housing projects, revealed that Global Kids successfully prepared youth workers to inspire and guide teens to learn and create game prototypes about social and global issues.

The evaluation process included discussions with educators to determine its effectiveness. The interviews disclosed that facilitators were able to increase many students’ understanding of game content and game design while becoming more aware of social issues. Game interaction and discussions during workshops provided an engaging context to additionally explore serious global issues.

The program’s most important critics are ultimately the students, who overwhelmingly responded by gaining new skills while integrating art and societal concerns in a productive, engaging, innovative and inspiring learning environment. “We wanted to design this because we didn’t want anybody else to think we had the wrong idea of what genocide was,” said one teen designer in New York City. “We know what it is; we know how it impacts the world. So we wanted to show it both through our art and through our game.”

For more information about Global Kids’ Playing For Keeps Capacity Building Program, please visit: http://www.playing4keeps.org. To receive a copy of the evaluation, contact us at info@globalkids.org.

***
About Global Kids, Inc – www.globalkids.org.
Founded in 1989, Global Kids' mission is to inspire and educate urban youth to become successful students and global and community leaders by engaging them in socially dynamic, content-rich learning experiences. Through its leadership development and academic enrichment programs, Global Kids educates youth about critical international and domestic issues and promotes their engagement in civic life and the democratic process. Through professional development initiatives, Global Kids provides educators with strategies for integrating experiential learning methods and international issues into urban classrooms. Over ninety percent of the high school seniors who participate in Global Kids’ leadership programs graduate from high school.

Read the article below or on their site here.

Poverty in Haiti, fumbling rescue efforts during Hurricane Katrina, medical racism against prisoners are topics that are barely thought about by teenagers.

But Brooklyn teens thought that these sensitive, complex issues needed exposure, and create games to do just that.

"We give them free reign to decide what topic they want to pick, and they inevitably pick the most difficult topics you could imagine," said Barry Joseph, director of the Online Leadership Program at Global Kids, a New York-based nonprofit that teaches urban youth how to develop and create online games that highlight social issues. The nonprofit's Playing 4 Keeps after school program has kids meeting twice a week after school to talk about global topics and develop a social game. "You have to figure out how to generalize [the issue], so it works in the game context, without trivializing it," said Joseph.

"It helps them view themselves as having an important role in society and help them strategize what that role might look like, whether it’s something connected to international justice or human rights work, or just helping them to stay on the straight and narrow to go to college and get an education," said Joseph, who pointed out that more than 90 percent of participating students graduate high school and go on to college.

Students at Canarsie High School worked with game developers Digital Creations during the 2007/2008 school year to develop the Web based game Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City, which was released at http://tempestincrescentcity.ning.com/.

Global Kids recently received a grant from the AMD Foundation, the newly created charitable arm of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. "We have a tremendous opportunity to harness the passion that kids have for the gaming while teaching the skills they need to be successful in our 21st Century digital economy," stated Dirk Meyer, AMD president and chief operating officer in a press release.

The AMD Changing the Game initiative grants will benefit nonprofits teaching children how to create social issue games. Global Kids, Girlstart in Austin, Texas, Institute for Urban Game Design in Washington, D.C., and The Kenneth Lafferty Hess Family Charitable Foundation’s Science Buddies program based in Carmel, Calif., were the nonprofits chosen for Changing the Game's first year.

To mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the nonprofit Global Kids, has launched Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City to showcase the disaster’s heroes and reinforce emergency preparedness.

Just a few years ago, the virtual reality technology used in the game and Web site would have been alien to Carole Artigiani, 67, executive director of Global Kids and a Purpose Prize fellow.

A career path that once seemed incongruous now makes sense to her. “It wasn’t always as obvious to me as it is now, looking back on my life. Three dimensions were coming together: my background as an educator, my experience in social and political movements, and my passion for the issues in our country and the world,” Artigiani said.

Her path to her current encore career was a long and winding road. Here early career included teaching and a number of starts at graduate school. She got engaged, her husband was drafted, she had kids, and her husband was transferred.

She thrived when she returned to school, earning a master’s degree in women’s history. In graduate school she wrote her thesis on what she calls “second tier” women activists in Connecticut who were working on issues including anti-child labor, the promotion of nursery schools, public education, birth control rights and education.

She spent eight satisfying years at Sarah Lawrence College as a part-time administrator of the women’s history program.

An itch for something new propelled Artigiani out of her comfortable post. She was persuaded by a friend to take a part-time job working at the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) in New York City. The organization’s president suggested she find a way to educate high school students about world affairs. That grew into Global Kids, which Artigiani founded in 1989.

It was tough at the start. “I had no idea how to do this,” Artigiani remembered. But gradually she drew people of different backgrounds together and learned how to be a leader. “It was a matter of learning by doing,” she explained.

A breakthough came eight years ago, when Global Kids received a grant to bring in a technology expert, with a guaranteed salary for two years. Employees started experimenting with games and engaging kids in online dialogue.

Six months after 9-11, they created an international online dialogue among young people about their current thoughts and responses to the tragedy. The project generated media attention, and Global Kids began receiving grants, starting with the Surdna Foundation. “We’ve been very lucky,” Artigiani acknowledged.

This week the organization will issue the Global Kids Second Life Curriculum, which contains 164 lesson plans to help teachers use Second Life in both formal and informal educational settings.

Artigiani has come to see games as an ideal 21st century vehicle for illustrating global issues and challenges. For example, another Global Kids game, Ayiti: The Costs of Life, helps players experience the obstacle of poverty to education in Haiti, the home country of a number of students who designed the game.

“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I’d be doing what I’m doing now,” she says.