Mod 7 Post 6

 One of the "open source games" I want to talk about has been in my life for a long time. When Wordle became big, many people created spinoff versions. I found two that I used to play for fun but have now incorporated into my classroom. One is called Statele. This is a geography game that is built to mimic Wordle, I tend to use this as a bell ringer while everybody is still settling in. 

Students are given an image of the state in question and are given 6 opportunities to guess the state correctly. As we guess, we are given directional clues to help us locate the state. 

Students work together to decipher the compass and distance hints to get closer. After they correctly identify the state they are presented with bonus questions. 

 Students are forced to create a map inside of their head. They are thinking about the country as a whole instead of one state at a time. Students are also able to type into the search bar and have the correct spelling of the states presented. They don't need to be good spellers; they are able to have a word bank. This is only one step of being literate; literacy in social studies requires students to be literate in maps/geography. Students are thinking in terms of North, South, East, and West, as well as distance between areas. Eventually leading them to "triangulate" the correct state. 

There are many ways to incorporate this game into the classroom. I tend to use this for the whole class, breaking the class into groups and letting each one guess a state. This allows each member to talk about instead of being drowned out by the entire class. They are able to use their own thought process for a common goal and create a system that leads to success. But there is the ability to assign it individually as everyday is the same state for everyone and their profile can save the progress as they complete the assignment.