Today is Digital Learning Day, a nationwide celebration of innovative teaching and learning through digital media and technology that engages students and provides them with a rich, personalized educational experience. In recognizing this special day, the Alliance welcomes our friends at E-Line Media as guest bloggers:

Here at E-Line Media, we’re excited to help support Digital Learning Day by encouraging teachers to get their students started on a path toward making their own video games through Gamestar Mechanic. Gamestar is an online game and community about playing, designing and sharing games, and it’s through this resource that many students enter their finished games in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards video game category each year. By playing quests in Gamestar, students learn the fundamental mechanics that make a good game and, in doing so, learn important systems thinking, develop critical thinking abilities, recognize the value of collaboration and – perhaps most excitingly! – earn tools that will allow them to make their own drop-and-drag video games. Once students have leveled up in the game from players to designers, they can create rich worlds with fantastical narratives and then share their games with a community of other youth game designers.

E-Line has been an Alliance partner for the Awards’ video game design category for several years – helping to shape the program and working alongside the organization with the category’s main funder, the AMD Foundation. Our professional video game designers also serve as judges for the Awards’ and have been incredibly impressed with the imaginative, thoughtful, fun and challenging games we’ve seen students create and submit with Gamestar Mechanic.

E-Line Media has also co-presented with the Alliance on game design in the classroom at National Art Education Association Conferences and in student and teacher workshops across the country. Teachers who want to make Gamestar Mechanic a part of their classes can access our robust Learning Guide that provides lessons and activities for using game-making for story-telling, demonstrating understanding of core subject matters, and teaching important 21st century skills. A quick introduction video will get you going right away!

Gamestar Mechanic is supported by a partnership between the Institute of Play, the Alliance, the AMD Foundation, and E-Line Media, and was initially funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Celebrate Digital Learning Day with us! Visit: http://gamestarmechanic.com/landing/digital_learning_day