{"id":14794,"date":"2012-05-23T06:34:03","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T11:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=14794"},"modified":"2012-05-22T09:14:45","modified_gmt":"2012-05-22T14:14:45","slug":"zombie-based-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=14794","title":{"rendered":"Zombie-Based Learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I know I gripe about the ubiquity of zombies in pop culture right now, but this is actually pretty cool.  Middle-school teacher David Hunter is engaging his students in geography by teaching it in the context of surviving a zombie outbreak.  He&#8217;s put up a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/projects\/hunterd\/zombie-based-learning-geography-taught-in-zombie-a\">Kickstarter project<\/a> to help fund his curriculum design.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The narrative is what leads the learner through scenarios in the zombie apocalypse where geographic skills will need to be applied. This narrative has 5 different scenes:<\/p>\n<p><i>Planning for the Outbreak<\/i><br \/>\nNews of a zombie-like outbreak has reached your community. You are helping to plan in case the outbreak reaches your area.<\/p>\n<p><i>Post Outbreak Survival<\/i><br \/>\nThe outbreak has reached your area and chaos has followed. You use your skills to just try and survive and find other survivors.<\/p>\n<p><i>Finding a Place to Settle<\/i><br \/>\nThrough surviving you have met with other survivors, now you are trying to decide upon a safe place<\/p>\n<p><i>Building a Community<\/i><br \/>\nWith your group of survivors, you make decisions to build a safe and sustainable community.<\/p>\n<p><i>Planning for the Future<\/i><br \/>\nBased on what you know about Geography, and based on a knowledge of the past, your community makes long term plans for survival and rebuilding a life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think this is a marvelous learning tool.  One of the best ways to teach a subject is to help the students understand why it matters (even if the application to everyday life is somewhat&#8230;tenuous).  Dry facts and figures are boring; information that&#8217;ll keep your face from being eaten off by zombies is something you&#8217;ll probably pay attention to.<\/p>\n<p>This technique could be expanded to many other subjects and a wide variety of monstrous threats, from studying disease vectors in the context of vampirism to using Oceanography for finding R&#8217;lyeh.  If you&#8217;ve got a kid who&#8217;s reluctant to study, this might be a useful way to engage their interest.<\/p>\n<p><i>(via <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/\">BoingBoing<\/a>)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I know I gripe about the ubiquity of zombies in pop culture right now, but this is actually pretty cool. Middle-school teacher David Hunter is engaging his students in geography by teaching it in the context of surviving a zombie outbreak. He&#8217;s put up a Kickstarter project to help fund his curriculum design. The narrative [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bittens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14794"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14898,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14794\/revisions\/14898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}