I’ve mentioned before that Edutopia has some great information on project-based learning. What I haven’t mentioned is that the Edutopia website conveniently indexes content from multiple blogs according to topic. On the index page for game-based learning, I found a July 2013 post by Matthew Farber on gaming for social good. His post has links to several interesting free online games, such as Ayiti: The Cost of Life (which we’ve talked about here and here). A similar game about rural poverty, but with what some might regard as a more elegant user interface, is 3rd World Farmer.
Farber’s post led me to the Half the Sky Movement, a partnership between USAID and fhi 360‘s Communication for Change (C-Change) project that is focused on women’s empowerment in the developing world. Half the Sky has a simple Facebook adventure game, three mobile phone-based games, a full-length documentary (George Clooney fans, take note), and eighteen free online videos about the lives of women in Kenya, India, Liberia, and Somaliland. The games and films engagingly present topics such as:
- Family planning/reproductive health
- Girls’ education
- Women and children’s health
- Economic empowerment
- Sex trafficking
- Domestic violence
These resources are quite worthy of your consideration if you are teaching about economics, international development, public health, women and politics, and education.
Thanks for your words about Half the Sky Movement. There are also lesson plans geared towards high school students and teachers available here: http://itvs.org/educators/collections/half-the-sky