Kids and Game Critique Themes

Barbara asked yesterday whether or not we thought the kids might be ready to start thinking about specific themes or issues within the games like characters, graphics, or music. I think they are and that bringing in a new challenge in addition to the games might be a good way to help them be more critical. They have had time to settle into a routine in the Games Lab and have had quite a bit of time to explore and play the games available to them. It might be useful to model how to do this with one particular game so that they have an idea of the kind of vocabularly and language to use (something Dolly talked about when she was here). I think the poster presentations will be a good start in this direction. Maybe having a single theme of the day (such as graphics or character development or plot) would help to give everyone a common purpose and discussion topic.