I am a school counselor in North Carolina and have a small group of boys that I check in with weekly to work on behavioral and academic goals. We just finished up the game Quandary and I wanted to see how they responded to something different and more interactive. Celeste is a precision platformer (think old school Mario) that follows a girl trying to climb a mountain. As this is a small group, my lessons tend to be less structured and more conversational than a traditional lesson would be. I began by talking about failure and what "mountains” the boys all have. After discussing, I had the student who won our last game come up and play it on my laptop which was connected to the big screen TV.
The conversations circled around resilience and positivity in spite of failure. It was also great for the kids to work on teamwork as they would jump in and help one another when someone was struggling with a level. After they played a few levels, we circled back up and discussed how it felt to fail and how it felt to have teammates who were there to help when they were struggling.
I've been down quite the rabbit- hole lately with GBL. I am SO thankful that this resource is available! I will be using this game again with my test prep group closer to testing season. I’m going to try to use the game Oxenfree next, but need to play through it myself first to make sure it’s appropriate for middle schoolers. 🤠
I literally just finished Oxenfree the other day! Let me know how it goes because I've been going back in forth in my mind about whether I should try teaching with it.