It’s your first day as a teacher. You walk into a noisy class of sophomores. Everything has been leading up to this moment. You finished a bachelor’s degree, went on to take courses for your teacher certification and completed 16 weeks as a non-paid student intern.

You ask the students to stand up for a little warm-up exercise and a student named “Butch” in the front row tells you to “suck it.” During the first week, you see students slouched in their seats, not bringing materials to class, tapping fingers on the desk, swearing at one another and directing their anger and frustrations toward you – the person who wants to help them.

There were times during student teaching when a good story or joke won the class over to your side, but none of that is working in this class. Time is going on and it’s not getting any better. Do you stay, or do you try a new profession

The comment I heard that day was actually a lot more disgusting – so bad, in fact, that I asked him to leave and never return. Teachers, if given the opportunity, will tell you stories that make the one above seem bland. But, I decided to stay.

I began working on a solution that was almost the complete opposite of the advice I was getting. Much of the advice I heard told me to be more strict – to “put the hammer down” and establish authority.

I began thinking about a much different type of classroom. Instead of delivering information from a textbook in neatly planned units of study, what if I were to put together a game, allowed students to help develop it and make changes along the way.

What if I didn’t have to lecture at all, but had students cover all their course requirements by playing this game? I imagined a seamless environment, where there were multiple levels of learning and students learned many subjects at the same time.

What if every type of learner, every student would find a niche or a unique way to demonstrate their understanding of the material? Since this was a world history class, they would have to learn history, geography and some 40 chapters of a textbook. Could this be accomplished by playing a game?

Over the next several years the game took shape. Students played a game similar to Risk, but had to answer questions to either defend or take over a country. The reward for each country was a point value based on the current per capita income of that nation. Every time they handed in an assignment those points would convert to dollars and that amount would then be entered into student checking accounts (each student kept a handout in their notebooks that was designed to look like a real check book.) If a student scored a 100 on a test, for example, that would convert to $100,000 in Global Challenge money.  This created a natural incentive for students to perform well on quizzes, tests and assignments.

Players used their money to buy more armies or weapons, to defend or attack a nation, or could even use it to purchase bathroom passes.

Instead of answering pre-written textbook questions, students would be required each week to write up their own questions broken into seven categories. Those were the basic rules, but the activities the students would engage in was where I thought the real learning was taking place.

To prepare for each round of the game, students would look over maps, determine where strong economies existed in the world, make plans to score higher on quizzes and tests (so they could make more money), look for strategic partnerships and study maps. While left-brain learners methodically worked on organizing information, building spreadsheets (to track points, armies, weapons, land mass, per capita incomes, game questions, etc.) and keeping order during the game, the right-brain learners created team logos and notebook covers, wrote theme music or helped to visualize grand plans for winning.

Once, I was at the public library after school and ran into a student who had maps spread out all over the table. He turned to me with a smile and said, "I bet you're surprised to see me here."

I have to admit that I was a little surprised. What was Jacob doing with all these maps? Before this game ever started, Jacob never seemed to care much about world history. He was getting a D or F in class. But, there he was, looking over maps, putting his strategy together for Global Challenge.

Other kids surprised me, too. Some wanted to build systems on the computer to keep track of all the information and numbers being generated by the game. Discussions carried over into the hallways. People, who ordinarily were withdrawn, began to get involved and often came in during lunch or after school. The project began taking on new dimensions, growing in an emergent process like a city – responding to new needs and demands.

Does this type of bottom-up approach work anywhere else? If you look around, you’ll see that this same “emergent” philosophy was working well for Microsoft in the '90s as Google today.

Rather than dictate rigid demands from the top, they allowed their employees to be creative from the bottom up. Today, Google still allows their employees to use 20 percent of their time to work on their own creations.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter or the whole concept of blogs and wikis are wildly popular because they allow users to create the content. They provide the basic structure, but the user decides what they’ll do with it. How many people are using Facebook now? I think the number is 250 million!

In the same way, Global Challenge allows the teacher and student a great deal of latitude. The teacher can play a simplified version of the game or can make it more complex for advanced students. The idea is to leave it open to interpretation so that the teacher can adapt it to whatever suits his or her needs best.

With school about to start or already started in the Sacramento area, many area teachers are filled with excitement and anxiety about the upcoming school year. Many are thinking, what can I do differently this year to reach my students? How can I get my students motivated to participate? How will I control potential classroom problems? The answer may very well lie in games and projects like Global Challenge.

Realizing the reduced size of school budgets for extra programs, I will offer the program for free to one area middle or high school this fall. If you are the first teacher or administrator to contact me directly, you’ll get a digital copy of the program, a one day workshop and five hours of support – all free. 

For more information about this project, contact me directly at: lchazen@gmail.com

For details about Global Challenge go to: http://visualcv.com/lchazen

You can also visit my blog at: http://rightbrainworld.blogspot.com