A version of this article will appear in the Fall 2026 edition of Kappan. When one ponders the future of education, it’s apt, perhaps, to consider the future of schooling. We’ve taken for granted that schools exist. I’m guessing you attended a…
I’m pleased to be a presenter at the 2026 Educators Rising National Conference in Portland. I’m leading a breakout session on gamification and using the psychology of game design in instruction. I hope to have both teacher leaders and students in my…
Games, according to Chou (2019), typically have four phases. Think of these as phases the player experiences as they play the game. So, I’ve been watching Season 3 of Squid Game on Netflix. I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s…
I’m not a game designer. But, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call me a designer. Nor would it be a stretch to call teachers designers. They design experiences for others to have in order to learn. Teachers are Designers The staid…
This past week I’ve been using the three major LLMs available to the general public: ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Google Gemini. I’m not writing this to compare the three, but to report out how a few things I’ve learned and how I’ve…
Reflecting Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m a reflective person. And among all the things that have fascinated me about the field of education is how we learn, and to some extent, how this body of growing knowledge may contradict…
In 2023 I began some intensive research around the topic of gamification. This topic seemed to have its heyday in the literature (books, articles) nearly a decade ago, with a seeming golden year around 2015. “Gameful design attempts to design interactive systems…
I often feel nostalgic at the end of every year. Not for what I did this year, per se, but it’s just a natural time for me to think about a lot of things, some of which are themes that attract themselves…
I used to be an expert at a program on my computer. When I say expert, I don’t mean just good. I used Finale (music notation software) from version 1 (1988) heavily until 1999, completing a good solid decade of almost daily…
One of the things I regret is not saving all of my chats and email from college. I remember learning how to download email at some point and kept copies of some of it on floppy disks. My many hours (days, weeks)…
