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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2006 > July > 24 > Entry
Reading, writing and video games
(David White, principal of the new Dayton Technology Design High School. DDN photo by Jim Witmer)
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
The Dayton school district’s newest high school wants kids who are willing to spend hours staring at a video screen, working on their skills, until they master the challenges presented to them.
And some of the district’s academic stragglers already have made such a commitment, spending hours seeking electronic Super Bowl titles, imaginary ill-gotten riches or fantastic conquests over video villains.
Capitalizing on youthful passion for video games, school leaders hope to keep more kids in school by offering the chance to conceive, design, build — and sell — their own video game.
“That’s what they love,” said David White, the school’s chief academic officer. “That’s the hook.”
The Dayton Technology Design High School will enroll about 100 students, with about 80 in the “virtual game” track, requiring a three-year commitment and culminating in the completion, marketing and possibly sale of a student-created educational video game.
“When we first started talking about the video game, people laughed at us,” Superintendent Percy Mack said. “But they laughed at the Wright brothers, too.”
White knows a few things about kids who are at risk to drop out. He last worked at the ISUS Trade and Tech Prep High School, a highly regarded charter school that teaches building trades to dropouts, where he was assistant superintendent.
This technology design school, he said, is built around the typical dropout or at risk student.
“We play to their strengths,” he said. “That doesn’t happen in traditional schools.”
Before ISUS, White worked with a group that helped start the three Mound Street Academy dropout-focused charter schools run by the Montgomery County Educational Service Center that teach military, health care and information technology skills. And he also has roots in the school district, where he was an assistant principal at Meadowdale and Patterson high schools.
Troubled students, he said, have a typical personality profile. They score very low on assertiveness, calmness and “conscience restraint,” or the ability to control emotional responses.
But the same kids post among the highest scores for sociability and conformity.
“They like to talk — and especially to text,” White said. “Sociability is what they crave. But they love structure, order, routine and high expectations. You have to provide that for them or they provide their own.”
The technology design school is for 16- to 22-year-olds willing to make a three-year commitment. During 70-minute periods, course work will cover math, science, social studies and English. In virtual game classes, students will work in groups of no more than 12 on a schoolwide project, creating an educational video game.
The goal is to teach the kids work force, academic, life and “new economy” skills. Student work will focus on developing the technical framework of the game, managing the process and marketing the end product.
White said he envisions a game in the mold of a classic called Oregon Trail, a strategy game in which players must answer academic questions to earn supplies and move ahead in virtual quest to make it to the early American West.
The students will need to create an attractive concept, design the game functions and create the content.
In a perfect world, the game would prove marketable to other schools to use as a classroom tool as part of their curriculum, and income from sales could be reinvested in other projects or even used for stipends for students.
White said the model is unique — a hybrid of the purely online curriculum of “cyber” schools combined with the in-the-classroom intensity of schools designed for dropouts.
The technology design school will be housed at Jackson Center, a school remodeled as a teacher training unit, but will technically be a “conversion” charter school sponsored by the district but independently run by a separate governing board headed by former school board member Doniece Gatliff.
The hope is to get kids up to speed on academics while imparting job-ready skills like management and marketing along with technology training that could make them career ready, perhaps even in the booming video game development industry.
“This is not just a game,” Mack said. “It’s about educating students and giving them something they can do after they graduate.”
NOTE: Click here for more on the Dayton Technology Design High School.
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