Bill MacKenty

Getting your foot in the door

A question:

Hello. I am very interested in games in education and would love to get
involved in this as a career move. Please contact me.

An answer:

First of all, thank you for asking. It’s actually a great question. 

Become a teacher or school librarian

Almost every state offers a friendly certification process. Usually you need to take 3 or 4 standardized tests. These consist of basic math and writing,  human development and learning, subject matter, and pedagogy (every state is different, but that’s the basic gist).

Once you are a teacher (English, science, history, math, etc…) start using games to teach!  As long as you have high standards for your students, you will be fine. 

Being a teacher is great work. Very difficult, and very rewarding.

You could start an after-school club, or do something at your local library, but the real potential of games in the classroom is content-specialists using them to teach. This is an article I wrote about how to use games in your classroom once you are a teacher. Lot’s of stuff to think about before you throw the kids in front of Sim City, or the Sims.

School librarians are often at the center of technology in a school, so it is a logical place to advocate and encourage the use of games (and other technology) in a building.

I suppose you could enter academia, and study the use of games in education (we could always use more research to help inform our thinking about games in the classroom) but I believe it is actual practitioners who can really show this stuff working.